Weekend estimates: Mortal Kombat and Demon Slayer knock it out the park
April 25, 2021
After a few pleasant surprises in recent months, this looks like the weekend that the theatrical business has been looking for. Not only is Mortal Kombat beating expectations with a weekend projected to hit $22.5 million, per Warner Bros.’ Sunday morning numbers, but Demon Slayer The Movie: Mugen Train is headed for the second-best opening for an anime movie ever, behind 1999’s Pokemon: The First Movie, with a projected $19.5 million. What’s more, both films are R-rated, meaning that they firmly fall outside the family-film space that has been the brightest spot in the market recently.
Both films comprehensively beat our model’s prediction. Mortal Kombat is coming in 66% ahead of what the model expected, and Demon Slayer will nearly triple its predicted opening. As I noted on Friday, Demon Slayer was a hard film to predict because the adult anime market has been growing so fast in recent years and there were relatively few comparable films to use in the model. Dragon Ball Super: Broly opened with $9.8 million Friday–Sunday back in 2019, and made $20.2 million by the end of its first weekend (having opened on a Wednesday). So this weekend isn’t completely unprecedented, but Dragon Ball Super wasn’t opening in the midst of a pandemic. Demon Slayer has the benefit of playing in more theaters (1,605 compared to 1,247), which obviously will have helped. The bottom line, though, is that it has attracted an audience that wasn’t going to be put off by reduced-capacity screenings and additional health precautions on the part of theaters. How many other films can engender that kind of audience commitment at the moment is an open question, and there’s an argument that the opening of Demon Slayer, while absolutely a reason for celebration, is also something of a one off.
Mortal Kombat’s opening, however, is definitely a good reason to start feeling better about the health of the domestic theatrical market. While it is almost $10 million behind the debut of Godzilla vs. Kong, it’s also comfortably ahead of our model’s prediction, and the model had a lot more history to work with for this film than it did for Demon Slayer. Given the number of theaters it is playing in, the model would expect an opening of $36.8 million if audiences weren’t diminished due to the pandemic. That means the film persuaded around 61% of its audience to come to theaters, which is one of the best results during the pandemic, and not far behind Godzilla vs. Kong’s 68% audience reach. It has a desperately small sample of just four films, but the model estimates that wide releases in April drew 55% of their normal audience, which is easily the best month of the pandemic and up from 42% in March.
I would urge some caution. This weekend looks great on paper, and confirms that the theatrical market recovery is picking up, but some of the reason for the good weekends for the top two films is people picking Mortal Kombat or Demon Slayer over Godzilla vs. Kong and The Unholy, both of which fell below the model’s expectations. It’s also just one weekend, and a lot of people who turned out to see Demon Slayer this weekend might not be drawn back to theaters for a while, given the modest slate of films set to come out in the next few weeks.
But this weekend has two lessons for the industry. First, the recovery is firmly under way, and second, movie fans will return to theaters for the right kind of film. The next stage of the recovery will likely rely on the major studios holding their nerve and keeping to their current May, June, and July release schedules. If they can do that, this weekend won’t be a one-off.
Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com
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Filed under: Weekend Estimates, Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat, The Unholy, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba—The Movie: Mugen Train (劇場版「鬼滅の刃」 無限列車編)