Weekend estimates: Croods pulls clear of the pack
February 21, 2021
The Croods: A New Age will, as expected, finish top at the box office this weekend. In doing so, it becomes the first film in the 21st century to top the chart in its 13th weekend in release. The last film to achieve the feat was Titanic back in 1998. Titanic went on to win 15 weekends during its incredible first run. If A New Age surpassed that number, we’d have to look back to ET’s run in 1982 for something comparable. That film had 16 weekend wins spread through the second half of the year, including the weekend after Thanksgiving—its 26th in release.
Interesting as these stats may be to the connoisseur of box office records, Croods was down 18% from last weekend, which is a slight disappointment, although there is some potentially good news lurking when we look at the complete set of weekend estimates…
The Croods’ $1.7 million weekend takes it past $50 million in total, making it only the second film (after Tenet) to hit that mark during the pandemic. Its legs, particularly since the start of the year, have been impressive, with virtually no decline in its weekend total since it earned $1.8 million over the weekend of January 8.
Most films underperformed our prediction this weekend (Land was a notable exception, although it still declined 44% from its opening weekend). That obviously isn’t great news when we’re hoping for the box office to start improving. The glimmer of hope is that it’s exactly what we’d expect coming off a holiday weekend. The President’s Day weekend isn’t traditionally a huge one at the box office, but it does normally produce a bump in numbers for all films. That seems to have been the case this time around, which is notable because we didn’t see the same kind of increase over MLK weekend or New Year’s weekend.
That, I will acknowledge, is a glass-half-full interpretation of what we’re seeing in theaters this weekend. Hopefully that optimism will be reaffirmed by a respectable opening for Tom and Jerry next weekend.
Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com
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Filed under: Weekend Estimates, The Croods: A New Age, Tenet, Tom and Jerry, Land