Weekend projections: Chainsaw Man debuts with $17 million to keep box office earnings above water

Chainsaw Man—The Movie: Reze Arc will take an easy win at the box office this weekend, with Sony projecting a $17.25-million debut. That will take it well past Black Phone 2’s $13 million in its second weekend. New releases, Regretting You and Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, will come in third and fourth.

Here are the official studio projections for the three-day weekend (click the image for a full chart of all films reporting so far):

What’s perhaps most remarkable about the weekend number for Chainsaw Man is how unremarkable it is. Five years ago, this would have been the biggest opening ever for a non-Pokemon anime movie. Today, it stands seventh on the best-anime weekend list. A chart of the growth of the genre in North America over the last decade shows how big a change we’ve seen:

We aren’t seeing many more anime films in total. Seven of them had reported box office in 2016, and we’ve had eight so far in 2025. What has changed dramatically is how much each of them earns: from around $1.5 million each a decade ago to an average of nearly $20 million this year. Even if we take into account the fact that Demon Slayer is an outlier, the average performance for an anime film now runs around $15 million at the domestic box office. The pandemic clearly turbo-charged the growth of the genre, and it now dwarves the market share of documentaries at the domestic box office (they have earned just shy of $60 million this year so far, at an average of under $1 million per movie).

Among other wide releases, Regretting You is coming in right in line with our model’s prediction, and its $12.85-million debut is a decent result for a romantic drama. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has had something of a comeback through the weekend, landing about 20% ahead of what the model predicted on Friday morning. Its $9.1 million opening compares to The Smashing Machine’s $5.8 million three weeks ago. With Christy coming out in two weeks, we’re getting a picture of demand for biopics at the moment, and the results aren’t great. Perhaps Springsteen will get some further momentum and stick around for a while. It at least won’t have much new competition next weekend.

Overall, we have Chainsaw Man to thank for an up weekend at the box office compared to last weekend. Unfortunately, we’re down 24% from last year, as October shapes up to be a very slow month in movie theaters.

– Studio weekend projections

– All-time top-grossing movies in North America

– All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

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Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com