Weekend estimates: Tenet still top, reaches $300 million worldwide, Hocus Pocus surprises
October 4, 2020
The best that can be said about this weekend at the box office is that a movie is doing better than expected. However, to put that in perspective, the movie in question is a re-release of a film that opened in fourth place back in 1993, and earned four times as much on its original opening weekend (when ticket prices were less than half what they are now) as it did this weekend. The movie, of course, is Hocus Pocus, and its $1.925 million weekend is a welcome surprise for a film that will presumably be drawing more of a family audience than the other films in release right now (Disney has not reported any demographic information for the film).
Hocus Pocus is a bit of a curiosity. It wasn’t that big a hit when it first came out, grossing a little under $40 million, and it rather badly lost a head-to-head match-up with Free Willy, which opened on the same weekend and went on to earn almost $78 million domestically. Disney decided to release Hocus Pocus in the decidedly unseasonal month of July partly because they had The Nightmare Before Christmas lined up for Halloween. In short, it’s a movie that one would expect to disappear from store shelves and generally fade from memory—like Dennis the Menace, for example, which opened just a few weeks earlier, did slightly better at the box office, and is now most likely to pop up as a trivia answer, thanks to providing Natasha Lyonne with her first major movie role.
Somehow, Hocus Pocus clung on. Indeed, it has become a Halloween home video staple, and has returned to the upper reaches of the DVD and Blu-ray sales charts every October since 2008. On the subject of trivia, it is probably about to become the first film ever to be in the top five in both the video disc sales chart and the box office chart in the same week. We’ll know in a couple of weeks where it ranked in the video sales chart this week, but it was already in second place the week of September 20 and its sales generally ramp up leading up to Halloween itself.
Given the love audiences feel for Hocus Pocus, it’s perhaps not surprising to see it do relatively well on a rare return to theaters. It’ll finish this weekend in second place behind Tenet, which will gross $2.7 million this time around for a total of $45.1 million domestically. Generally, returning movies were weak again this weekend, with none of them able to hit the weekend total predicted by our model. Fortunately they all came close enough that Hocus Pocus’ over-performance was enough for the weekend top five to end up slightly stronger than expected.
Internationally, Tenet hit $300 million, with Japan its best market this weekend outside the US. It made $2.5 million there, for $15.9 million so far. It’s still posting over $1 million a week in France ($1.1m for $20m) and Germany ($1.0m for $16.1m), and held well in the UK, where it earned $804K this weekend for $20.9m in total, and Korea, with $755K taking it to $14.2m there. It has earned a total of $65.5 million in China in total.
Disney reported $1.1 million internationally for Mulan this weekend, for a total of $66.8 million. The New Mutants will pick up another $900K, taking it to $21.0 million internationally, and $41.9 million worldwide. With no major openings on the horizon (we’re looking at you, Black Widow), Disney says they’ll be suspending international reporting for a time being. There next wide release is theoretically Soul on November 20, but that’s looking an optimistic goal right now.
- Weekend studio estimates
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- Weekend predictions
- Weekend theater counts
Filed under: Weekend Estimates, Hocus Pocus, Mulan, The New Mutants, Tenet, Natasha Lyonne