Weekend predictions: 355 won’t stop Spider-Man

January 7, 2022

The 355

The 355 goes up against the unstoppable force that is Spider-Man: No Way Home at the box office this weekend, and there’s really only one possible winner. Although the webbed crusader won’t be dislodged from the top spot, 355 could do decent business, and will tell us something about where the market stands as we start out 2022.

Here’s what our model thinks of our new wide release…





Action thrillers actually fairly well in the early part of last year, just as theaters were getting back to regular reopenings. Nobody and Wrath of Man in particular earned above expectations, even though their opening weekends of $6.8 million and $8.3 million respectively don’t look like much. At the time, our model thought those were equivalent to about $20 million in pre-pandemic days, though, which is very decent money for a film in this genre.

Things have shifted in recent months though, with The Protégé and CopShop both failing. My hunch is that those films were lost among the competition, and there’s a good chance that will happen to The 355 too. The model is more bullish, predicting a weekend around $5.8 million—equivalent to about $10 million in pre-pandemic money. I hunch that might be too high, but in any case we’ll have a useful benchmark going into the New Year.

The model thinks $5.8 million will be enough for third place this weekend…





No Way Home and Sing 2 shouldn’t be under much pressure in first and second spot, and The 355 would have to come in a long way short of expectations to miss out on third place. The complicating factor in the prediction is that all the returning films are coming off a holiday weekend, and should suffer relatively large drops. The model expects the weekend-to-weekend comparison will take about 17% off the box office for each film, but there are likely to be large variations between films. The large COVID case count in the US at the moment might deter moviegoers too. So I wouldn’t be at all surprised if quite a few films fall more than 50% from last weekend.

A combined weekend of $64 million looks fairly weak, and the final numbers could well come in below that, but it compares to a grand total of $9 million earned by all films over the equivalent weekend last year. That counts as a win, at least.

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Sing 2, The Protégé, Wrath of Man, Spider-Man: No Way Home, The 355, CopShop