Weekend projections: Fantastic Four easy winner, in spite of troubling decline

The Fantastic Four: First Steps will remain the top-grossing movie in theaters this weekend with ease, with The Bad Guys 2 and The Naked Gun opening in second and third place respectively. The super-hero movie will drop by 66% from its opening weekend, though, which is much steeper than Disney will have hoped for, given its good reviews. It will end the weekend with $198.4 million domestically and $170.3 million internationally, for a global total of $368.7 million.

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

Our model’s predicted final box office for Fantastic Four dips to $316 million as of today, compared to $336 million after its opening weekend. Movies that trend lower generally continue to do so, and $300 million looks like the likeliest outcome right now. By way of comparison, Jurassic World Rebirth is predicted to finish with $350 million, and Superman with $369 million right now. July’s three big tentpoles will combine for a shade over $1 billion at the domestic box office, which is an excellent result, even if Fantastic Four doesn’t have quite the legs we would have hoped for.

August is kicking off with three good results for films that never hoped to make hundreds of millions of dollars. The Bad Guys 2 is coming in a bit behind our Friday-morning prediction, but delivering a solid opening nonetheless. The Naked Gun, meanwhile, is outperforming expectations, which suggests good word-of-mouth. The last original live-action comedy to earn more than $17 million on opening weekend was Good Boys, which debuted with $21.4 million all the way back in August 2019.

Together is also doing very respectable business this weekend, with $6.8 million over three days and $10.9 million over the five days since it opened on Wednesday. That’s Neon’s best opening weekend since The Monkey’s $14 million back in February, and their third best ever behind The Monkey and Longlegs (which started out with $22.4 million).

– 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