Weekend projections: Send Help lands on top on weekend for the fans

Everyone’s a winner at the movies this weekend, with all four new wide releases more than hitting their marks, and some surprising strength among the returning movies. Send Help will come out on top, based on current projections, with a strong $20-million opening. Markiplier’s Iron Lung is showing what direct fan engagement can do, with a remarkable $17.8-million debut. Melania will have the best opening for a documentary in a while (more on that in a moment). Finally, Shelter is coming in with a weekend total that’s poor by Jason Statham’s standards, but good for fledgling distributor Black Bear Pictures.

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

Send Help’s $20-million opening is very similar to The Housemaid’s $19-million debut back in December. That movie has had a spectacular run at the box office, and passes $120 million in total this weekend. It would be a major surprise if Send Help legged out to that kind of total (our model predicts $59 million, based on its opening weekend), but seeing a plot-driven, R-rated thriller topping the chart shows that movies for grown-ups are a profitable proposition again. These two films also show the value of star power, especially if a movie gets the right people in the right roles.

The movies in second and third place show the value of a direct connection with an audience. I suspect there’s little overlap in the audiences for Iron Lung and Melania, but both films have brought their base into theaters. Iron Lung might rewrite the playbook for the YouTube-to-theaters movies. Previous attempts at putting social media stars in movies have failed, mainly because they thought putting social media stars in movies was enough. This movie is more of a shared journey, and mini-social movement, with the fans loving the concept of the film and supporting Markiplier’s efforts to get it into wide distribution. That dedication has more than paid off from everyone involved.

Melania’s relative success is a different story. For one of the most expensive documentary’s ever made, its $7-million would be ruinous for a studio without Amazon’s deep pockets, but it’s also considerably higher than the industry consensus going into the weekend. There’s an argument that Taylor Swift | The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, with its $34-million weekend back on October, remains comfortably the documentary with the biggest weekend of the 2020s. If one excludes musical docs and concert movies, jackass forever’s $23.1 million in February 2022 is arguably the highest-grossing documentary in recent years.

If one wants to stay strictly in the documentary lane, then Chimpanzee’s $10.4-million opening weekend back in 2012 is the last time a movie that billed itself as a straight documentary earned this kind of money.

However one slices the definitions, Melania has something in common with movies from Taylor Swift and the Jackass guys, in that it is bringing in an audience that feels a connection with its subject. In all those cases, reviews are neither here nor there. The audience feels a sense of connection by going to a theater, and (depending on where they are in the country, in the case of Melania), feeling a connection with their fellow moviegoers.

However divergent their content and fans may be, Iron Lung and Melania both tell us something about the future of moviegoing, as well as helping us to a strong weekend to end January at the box office.

– 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