Weekend estimates: West Side Story shows some legs with $10.5-million weekend win
December 12, 2021
As I said on Friday, the measure of success for West Side Story is not so much how it opens as how strong its legs are. Based on its performance through this weekend, there’s cause for some mild optimism. Ahead of the weekend, our model expected an opening around $6.9 million, based on its debut in a relatively modest 2,820 theaters and current market conditions. Its $800,000 in preview earnings suggested a weekend close to $10 million was on the cards, and bumped the model’s prediction up to $8.27 million. This morning Disney announced a projected $10.5 million for the film over its opening weekend. While that’s hardly a reason for dancing in the streets, it does suggest the film will play well for a while.
Here’s how the weekend looks as of Sunday morning…
On Friday morning, our model gave Encanto a slight edge in its head-to-head match-up with West Side Story. As it turns out, both films will end up topping their predictions, but West Side Story is doing so by some distance. It’s early days, but the Spielberg musical does seem to be retaining its audience fairly well, with a preview-to-opening-weekend multiplier of over 13, which is slightly ahead of average for a musical on opening weekend, and high in general (my personal rule of thumb is that the weekend is usually around 10 times the preview number).
When all is said and done though, $10.5 million is far from a record-setting start—it’s slightly below the $11.5 million In the Heights debuted with back in June, for example—and we don’t have conclusive proof that we’ll see a long run for West Side Story, particularly if it can’t hold on to theaters all the way through the holidays. The run of The Greatest Showman, which turned an $8.8 million opening into a $174.3-million total, provides some room for optimism, but a solid performance through the holidays and $40 million or $50 million in total would be a good result for West Side Story at this point.
The even worse news this weekend is the non-performance of National Champions, which is limping to $300,000 from 1,197 theaters for a theater average of just $251. While we can give STX Entertainment a bit of a pass, given that they haven’t released a film in quite a while and are going through ownership changes, there’s no avoiding the fact that this is a dismal result. In fact, it’s the fourth-worst theater average ever for a film opening in over 1,000 theaters, and the worst result for any film released during the pandemic.
With most of the returning films coming in behind expectations, possibly due to consumer concerns over the Omicron variant that looks like it’s spreading in the United States, the weekend as a whole is looking very soft indeed. In fact, this will be the quietest weekend at the box office since the weekend of September 24, when Shang-Chi held off Dear Evan Hansen to top the chart for a fourth weekend. We’ll need some big openings in the next couple of weeks to bring the market back to life. I’m looking at you, Spider-Man.
Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com
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Filed under: Weekend Estimates, Encanto, West Side Story, Dear Evan Hansen, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Spider-Man: No Way Home, National Champions