Weekend predictions: Minions eye $100-million long weekend

July 1, 2022

Minions: The Rise of Gru will, as expected, pull off a comfortable win at the box office this weekend. While it won’t have much competition from other films, it will have a mini-contest with itself as it shoots to earn $100 million over the Holiday. There’s a chance it’ll hit that number over three days, but my money is on it achieving the feat over four.

First up, here’s what our model thought of Minions’ prospects before we had its preview numbers:

The first Minions movie had the best opening of any film in the Despicable Me franchise, with $115.7 million the weekend after July 4, 2015. So something around $100 million wouldn’t be a major surprise. The model looks as all films in the franchise though, and settles on a prediction of around $78 million under normal circumstances. That’s boosted by 6% thanks to the film’s release in 4,391 theaters, but clipped back 10% by market conditions. Specifically, the model estimates the overall market to be 71% of its pre-pandemic level right now, but that Minions has generated 19% more “buzz” than anticipated based on social media tracking.

All that resulted in a prediction of $74.6 million before we knew the Thursday preview numbers, which look very good:

As I noted a few weeks ago, preview numbers since the pandemic have been skewing a little higher than they did pre-pandemic, perhaps reflecting a long-term trend towards moviegoers wanting to be among the first to see a film, or maybe that the current audience is skewed towards more enthusiastic fans (I suspect it’s a combination of the two). The model doesn’t entirely adjust for that yet, simply because we don’t have films to be certain what the effect is. So the model’s predicted $108-million three-day weekend based on the previews is probably a bit high.

Our final estimate is a weighted average of the fundamentals prediction and the previews prediction, which pulls the final prediction down somewhat. Down to $99.9 million, to be precise. That still feels a shade high for three days to me, but the film should easily top $100 million over the four-day Holiday weekend, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if it came very close, or even fractionally exceeded, $100 million over three.

This weekend’s other new wide release is Mr. Malcolm’s List, and rare historical romantic comedy being released by Bleecker Street. For cases like this one, the model relies quite heavily on films from the distributor, and Bleecker Street has a fairly solid record of earning in the low millions from its wide releases. Given that this one is debuting in 1,384 theaters, and that films with romantic elements are still struggling at the box office, the model expects an opening of around $1.5 million.

It’s certainly an interesting piece of counter-programming, and a good test of whether this sector of the market is finally showing some signs of life.

Here’s how our model thinks the top 10 will work out…

Overall, we should see a nice uptick at the box office this weekend, with five returning films all still bringing in decent money. I’ll be keeping an eye out for Top Gun: Maverick. The model thinks it will decline just 8% this weekend, and it should have earned well over $560 million by the end of the long weekend. A $600 million domestic total is a formality at this point, and the film still looks like it will continue to play and play this Summer.

Bruce Nash

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Top Gun: Maverick, Minions: The Rise of Gru, Mr. Malcolm’s List, Despicable Me