Weekend projections: Dog Man lands excellent $36-million weekend, the biggest of 2025 so far

Dog Man is out the gate this weekend with an excellent $36-million debut—easily the best weekend for a movie so far this year. Universal is pointing out this morning that the film will land the second-highest opening weekend for an animated movie in January, behind only Kung Fun Panda 3’s $41.3 million. While a victory for the studio, this result is also a big miss for our model, and I’ll dig into what went wrong.

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

Dog Man’s debut is more than double our Friday-morning prediction. That’s a huge miss by our model’s standards, and we’ll be digging into the reasons behind it and looking at how the model can be improved over the next few days. What stands out right now is how high the final weekend number was compared to the Thursday previews. Here are the top-performing animated films since 2021 by that metric:

Clearly Dog Man has built momentum through the weekend thanks to great word of mouth. That’s hard for the model to predict—for example, there isn’t a strong correlation between the reviews for a movie and its Thursday-to-Sunday multiplier.

Our Friday-morning prediction isn’t just based on previews, but also on our “fundamentals” prediction, which says how much the model thinks a movie like this should do generally. That part of the model said that the film should do $30 million or so under ideal conditions, and about $23 million under current market conditions. I think it’s fair to say that the market is probably a little stronger than the model is estimating right now, and that’s something we’ll look into in the coming days. But what really stands out this morning is that our audience tracking was good, but not great, for Dog Man, with an upwards adjustment of 5%. That reflects a very well-timed marketing campaign on the part of Universal, with audience interest building rapidly over the week leading up to the release and peaking at just the right time. That’s another factor we’ll look at, to see if some last-minute adjustments would improve our predictions.

The bottom line is that we’re in the dog house this weekend, but at least there’s reason to celebrate 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