Weekend estimates: Raya tops the chart with $8.6 million
March 7, 2021
Raya and the Last Dragon will top the box office chart on its debut weekend with about $8.6 million according to Disney’s Sunday morning projection. While that’s 13% below our model’s $9.87 million prediction, and well behind the $14.11 million earned by Tom and Jerry last weekend, it’s a decent performance for the pandemic era, and some of the other results this weekend point towards a market that’s inching back towards recovery.
As I noted in my weekend predictions column, forecasting Raya’s weekend was complicated by a number of factors. I chose to consider it a family movie, and it looks as though that was a good call—48% of the audience was reportedly under 25, and 52% consisted of parents and their kids. We don’t have similar demographic information for Tom and Jerry, but Pokémon: Detective Pikachu had a similar 49% under-25 audience share. The decision to consider it a family film had a big influence on our prediction, which would have been closer to $5 million if I’d classed it as a general film.
The impact of the simultaneous release on Disney+ is hard to gauge. It certainly caused some discontent among theater owners, and some chains refused to show the film. That undoubtedly reduced its earnings—it would have grossed $10.5 million if it had the same theater average in 2,500 theaters instead of 2,045. There isn’t much evidence it hurt earnings at the theaters that did play it though. Its theater average is $4,205 compared to $5,701 for Tom and Jerry last weekend, but that could come down to appealing to an older demographic as much as it does being available on a streaming platform. Disney isn’t sharing any data from its Disney+ release, but the film was 6th on their trending chart yesterday and 2nd this morning, which suggests it’s doing well, although not necessarily doing blockbuster business.
Tom and Jerry will be down 53% this weekend, which is in line with our prediction. It looks as though competition has finally taken its toll on The Croods: A New Age though, which will fall to 5th place with a projected $780,000. If it really is competition that’s hitting its box office this weekend (and there’s little reason not to think so), that will be the first time we’ve seen it having an influence on box office since the pandemic started.
The other signs that we’re moving towards more normal market conditions are the opening weekends for Chaos Walking and Boogie. The former will more than double our model’s prediction with $3.825 million for the weekend, which is better than The Marksman’s $3.1 million in January although a little worse than the $4.8-million opening of The Little Things. Boogie’s $1.2-million projected weekend is considerably ahead of Land’s $899,810 four weeks ago.
The combined effect of the performance of this weekend’s new releases will move our model’s estimate of the share of moviegoers who are attending theaters up from 23% to 26%. That’s not a huge move, but at least it’s in the right direction.
Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com
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Filed under: Weekend Estimates, Chaos Walking, The Croods: A New Age, Raya and the Last Dragon, Tom and Jerry, The Little Things, Land, The Marksman, Boogie