Weekend predictions: Black Adam looks set to hold on at the top
November 4, 2022
Black Adam looks likely to take advantage of the calm before the Wakandan storm to top the box office chart again this weekend. Our model thinks it will land somewhere in the region of $17.6 million, which should be easily enough to hold off newcomer One Piece Film: Red.
One Piece presents a bit of challenge for our model, since there aren’t many anime films to compare against. At least we’re getting to the point where we know roughly what to expect for these films though.
Given its theater count, the model thinks One Piece should clock in with around $24 million. That seems high to me, and is a product partly of the model not distinguishing between different anime franchises. The small sample size contributes to the problem. Our audience tracking ahead of the release confirmed my suspicions, and reduce the fundamentals prediction by 30%.
It’s also worth noting that because all the comps are from the post-pandemic era, there is no market size adjustment in this prediction. While it’s true that anime doesn’t seem to have been badly hit by the pandemic, it probably isn’t completely immune to the ups and downs of the general theatrical market, which has been quite subdued in recent weeks.
The Thursday preview numbers pull things down further.
$1.7 million is a fairly modest number for an anime title recently, and suggests One Piece will struggle to top $10 million this weekend. Our fundamentals prediction does improve our final number above that psychologically-important level.
Here’s what our model thinks the top 10 as a whole will look like…
It looks like Black Adam will have no trouble recording a third straight weekend at the top of the chart. Ticket to Paradise will have a chance to prove it has strong legs as it expands into 4,066 theaters.
One film to keep a look our for is The Banshees of Inisherin, which looks likely to make it into the top 10. I must admit that its prediction here is not from our model, which doesn’t handle wide expansions like this very well. That’s something I’m be working on, and for now I’m using a “mini-model”, which includes some value judgments on my part. The $1.65 million number is most accurately described as what we in the data analytics world call a “guess.”
Filed under: Weekend Preview, Black Adam, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Ticket to Paradise, The Banshees of Inisherin, One Piece Film: Red