Weekend projections: John Wick: Chapter 4 continues franchise winning streak with $73.5 million projected opening

March 26, 2023

John Wick: Chapter 4

John Wick: Chapter 4 will continue the Wick franchise’s remarkable run of better box office with each installment this weekend. It’s projected to open with $73.525 million, according to Lionsgate, handily beating the $56.8-million opening of Chapter 3, and also giving the studio their best debut since The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2 back in 2015.

Here’s how the domestic numbers look as of Sunday morning (click on the image for the full chart of films reporting so far)…



John Wick will come in just a shade lower than our Friday-morning prediction, according to Lionsgate’s number, and could yet hit $75 million if it has a really good Sunday. Our model did a good job of predicting the final weekend, thanks to the way if combines the “fundamentals” prediction for a film, based on the performance of other films in the John Wick franchise in this case, and the “previews” prediction, which uses a film’s performance on Thursday to predict the final weekend.

John Wick is a perfect example of how preview numbers increase over time for a franchise:



For obvious reasons, fans of a franchise are more likely to show up for preview shows on Thursday, and as that fan base grows, the Thursday number becomes a bigger and bigger share of the weekend as a whole. Roughly speaking, ten times as many people showed up to the previews of John Wick: Chapter 4 as they did for the first John Wick back in 2014. That’s a really impressive growth over time, and bodes well for the performance of Ballerina (which we’ll surely see before the end of the year, although Lionsgate hasn’t announced a date yet), and John Wick: Chapter 5, which the studio confirmed late last year.

John Wick almost certainly dragged down the performance of some competing films this weekend, and the rest of the top four will all come in about 25% below our model’s forecast. That’s particularly bad news for Shazam! Fury of the Gods, which won’t even manage $10 million on its second weekend, and hasn’t yet made it to $50 million domestically.

The only two films in the top 10 to beat Friday’s predictions were Champions, which held on fairly well in spite of losing a lot of screens, and Avatar: The Way of Water, which kept its place in the top 10 at the expense of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Avatar now has over $680 million domestically and $2.3 billion worldwide.

- Studio weekend projections
- All-time top-grossing movies in North America
- All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

- Help support The Numbers with a small monthly or one-time donation.

Bruce Nash,

Filed under: John Wick