Weekend estimates: Tom and Jerry shows the strength of family movies with a $13.7-million debut
February 28, 2021
Tom and Jerry is enjoying the best weekend of 2021 so far, and the third-best of the pandemic era, according to Warner Bros.’ projections released on Sunday mornings. Its $13.71 million opening is a far cry from the $40 million to $50 million it might have earned before the pandemic, but it confirms something we’ve suspected since the stronger-than-expected openings of The War with Grandpa and The Croods: A New Age: family movies are performing much better during the pandemic than other types of film…
Overall, our model has done a pretty good job of predicting the opening weekends for movies during the pandemic, but the three family films released so far have all considerably outperformed its expectations. Statistically, you’d expect to see the occasional outlier, so it doesn’t make sense to change the model just because one movie does something unusual. Without other evidence, you’d expect a strong (or weak) performance to have a “real” underlying cause maybe 50% of the time. Two surprises might happen 25% of the time—just like flipping a coin heads twice in a row—and should alert you to the possibility that something is up. Now we have three movies to perform this far ahead of expectations, there’s maybe a 12.5% chance that this is simply luck, or an 87.5% chance that we should adjust the model to reflect the larger turnout for family films.
It turns out that the family audience is about half what it was pre-pandemic (after adjusting for theater closures), compared to a general audience that’s about a quarter the size that it was before. Going forward, I’ll be adding that expectation to the model, so we’ll have considerably higher predictions for family films. Ironically, there aren’t any more family films coming to theaters in wide release until Spirit Untamed and Peter Rabbit 2 in June (or arguably Cruella over Memorial Day weekend), but those could be the first films to show relatively normal box office numbers as we come out of the pandemic.
Tom and Jerry obviously helps the overall theatrical market considerably this weekend. As I noted in my weekend predictions article, Warner Bros.’ decision not to report theater counts at the moment makes predictions especially hard. The figures in the table above are based on the model’s predictions with the theater counts known. Tom and Jerry, for example, was predicted to earn around $6.2 million based on an assumed 2,200-theater opening. Its actual theater count, at 2,475, pushes its prediction up to $6.96 million (which is still well below its actual performance, of course). Wonder Woman held on to more theaters than expected, which was enough to keep the film in the top six. Judas and the Black Messiah lost more theaters than expected, and will fall to sixth place this weekend.
Although the difference is small, the combined theater count for all movies in the top six (10,538) is a shade higher than last weekend (10,478). Next weekend, with New York theaters starting to reopen, we should see that trend continue, which should in turn start to lift earnings. With three wide releases, including Raya and the Last Dragon, we should see another increase in business.
Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com
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Filed under: Weekend Estimates, The War with Grandpa, Wonder Woman 1984, The Croods: A New Age, Raya and the Last Dragon, Tom and Jerry, Judas and the Black Messiah