Weekend predictions: Bone Temple likely to go top

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple looks set to take top spot on the box office chart this weekend, although its $2.1 million in previews on Thursday is well behind the $5.8 million earned by 28 Years Later back in June last year. Avatar: Fire and Ash could have a strong hold, thanks to the MLK weekend, so the win for 28 Years isn’t entirely set in stone.

Here’s our model’s baseline prediction for Bone Temple:

This movie has consistently tracked behind the previous franchise outing, and an opening somewhere around $10 million behind 28 Years Later was where the model landed before we had official ticket sales numbers.

The previews aren’t significantly out of line with expectations, but a little on the soft side…

The holiday weekend should take 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple somewhere close to $20 million over four days, but its three-day looks as though it will fall short.

Here’s what the model thinks the top 10 will look like.

Our weekend predictions are still largely based on our “Holiday Season” model, which looks at the daily trends for films released between Thanksgiving and the New Year. That’s in contrast to our “normal” model, which looks at weekend-to-weekend trends and theater count changes. The model is seeing strong daily performance for Marty Supreme and Song Sung Blue right now, and I think those predictions are both on the high side. Likewise, Zootopia 2 will likely have a better weekend than the model is predicting.

Avatar is a big question mark… it’s losing 400 theaters, but the long weekend could help it rack up extra earnings on Sunday (something that the model does take into account). It could do well enough through three days to stay top of the chart, but a strong second place is probably the best bet.

Also of note, The Housemaid is likely to land third, and could have another essentially flat weekend, with something around $10 million more in the bank. It’ll certainly end the weekend with well over $100 million domestically.

Finally, the re-release of Madagascar is hard to predict. Our re-release model has struggled to land good predictions recently, partly, I think, because the moviegoing market has returned to something closer to normal. Releasing a “classic” that has pent up demand might still work—it’ll be interesting to see how Fathom Events does with the Lord of the Rings special events this weekend, for example. Is Madagascar a classic? I guess we’ll find out.

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