Weekend projections: Avatar stays top as new releases meet expectations

Avatar: Fire and Ash remains comfortably the most popular movie in North America this weekend, although a drop of 49% from last weekend means it’ll pick up $21.3 million—significantly below the $45.8 million earned by The Way of Water and $50.3 million by Avatar in their respective fourth weekends (see our full comparison of the three movies here). Primate will win the battle of the new releases, with Paramount projecting $11.3 million for the weekend, while Lionsgate puts Greenland 2: Migration at $8.5 million as of this morning.

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

Our model now thinks Fire and Ash will top out at $410 million domestically, a far cry from the $689 million (Way of Water) and $785 million (Avatar) earned by the previous two installments in the franchise. Internationally, it now has $888 million, for a global total of $1.231 billion. If it holds on overseas as well as the model thinks it will domestically, it will end just short of $1.5 billion worldwide. That’s surely enough to justify a sequel or two.

Primate is posting a solid opening weekend for a creature feature and its moderate over-performance compared to our Friday-morning prediction is encouraging. The model predicts it will end with $33.6 million based on its performance so far.

Greenland 2 is more of a disappointment, although it too is coming in slightly ahead of our prediction. Its audience is skewing “old,” with 85% 25+, and somewhat male, at a 56% share of the audience. The former number points to good legs, although it will really take a very strong hold next weekend to hold on to theaters long enough to take advantage of that. Lionsgate acquired the US rights to the film for $10 million, and expects it to be profitable for the studio. Our model predicts a final domestic box office gross of $22.9 million, although that doesn’t explicitly factor in the audience demographics. By way of comparison, we estimate the original movie has earned $42 million from video-on-demand purchases and rentals, roughly $30 million of which came from its PVOD run in late 2020 and early 2021. Lionsgate will be hoping for something around $40 million combined from box office and video earnings from this installment, and that looks like a good bet.

The model’s big miss this weekend was Zootopia 2, which will stay in fourth place, down 48% from last weekend. That’s not a surprising result, but the model basically expects a movie that opened over Thanksgiving to be shedding theaters and losing its audience fairly rapidly now. That’s largely happening during the week, but Zootopia is still drawing a big weekend crowd.

Overall, the new releases and strong holiday holds means the weekend will be 19% ahead of this time last year. It’s early days, and January theatergoing is a small fraction of the year as a whole, but putting an extra few tens of millions of dollars in the bank now gives us a buffer in case a movie or two misses out in the months to come.

– 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