Weekend predictions: Morbius headed to $40-million debut

April 1, 2022

Morbius

After a gigantic debut for Spider-Man: No Way Home and a pandemic-record-setting start for Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Sony is looking for a super hero three-peat this weekend with the release of Morbius. While another number one opening is guaranteed, we’re not looking at quite the same kind of numbers this time around, with our model predicting an opening weekend in the $41-million range.

Our long-range forecast for Morbius had the film opening with around $55 million to $70 million, based mostly on the performance of Venom, but our more fine-tuned analysis coming into the weekend reduced that expectation down to a little over $35 million. As you can see from the model’s final comps, there’s a lot of uncertainty given the Sony Marvel franchise’s very strong performance recently compared to more modest box office aspirations for the film’s star, Jared Leto, and director, Daniel Espinosa.

The existing audience for a franchise will usually help propel a film to good numbers regardless of who is in front of and behind the camera, but the variation in results here suggests some uncertainty going into the weekend.

Morbius made $5.7 million from preview shows on Thursday, which is very close to what one should expect for a film opening in the $35 million to $40 million range. So our final analysis looks as though it’ll be close to the real opening weekend. Comparison with preview numbers from other super hero pics suggest it’ll come in slightly higher than predicted…

Our final prediction is the weighted average of the fundamentals prediction and the previews prediction, and comes in at $41 million.

Morbius should easily win the weekend, and help boost the overall market by about 8% compared to last weekend. There’s likely to be a close race between The Batman and The Lost City for second place, with the model just giving The Batman the nod (although I personally think Lost City could sneak it).

Filed under: Weekend Preview, The Batman, Morbius, Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Lost City, Jared Leto, Daniel Espinosa