Weekend predictions: Godzilla vs. Kong could top $30 million this weekend

April 2, 2021

Godzilla vs. Kong has stormed out the gate over the past two days, at least by pandemic standards. Its $9.6-million opening day was the best single day by a film in the past year, and it didn’t drop by all that much yesterday, posting $6.7 million. That puts it on track for easily the biggest weekend box office for a film since theaters started reopening. Predicting how much it will make is complicated by its unusual release pattern—opening on Wednesday in 2,409 theaters and expanding to 3,064 theaters today—and by the fact that, well, there’s still a pandemic on.

To come up with a realistic prediction for G vs. K, I dug deep into our database for action movies released on Wednesdays, and found the five films with the most similar performance at the box office:

So far, Godzilla’s performance is most similar to Terminator: Genisys, which started out with $8.9 million on its opening day, July 1, 2015, and went on to make $27 million on its opening weekend. The comparison between the two films is far from perfect—Terminator opened over July 4 weekend, while Godzilla is opening over Easter weekend, for example, and Terminator had to compete against Jurassic World, which was playing in its fourth weekend—but $27 million is a good benchmark.

If we look at all five films with similar Wednesday/Thursday performances, and adjust for the fact that Godzilla vs. Kong is doing a shade better than the average of those films, a 3-day weekend over $30 million begins to look quite likely. In fact, by this reckoning, Godzilla’s opening could be a little over $35 million, and it would end the weekend with a cumulative total of $51.4 million. That would be good news indeed.

The Unholy has slipped almost completely under the radar and doesn’t seem likely to make much of an impact at the box office, except possibly as a back-up option for people who can’t get tickets to Godzilla. Our model thinks it will struggle to hit $2 million, but that’s because of a sizable pandemic adjustment that still assumes only 29% of moviegoers are going to theaters. As I’ve mentioned a few times recently, that number is looking a little low based on how films have done over the past month or so. Still, anything over $2 million would be a good result for Unholy.

Godzilla is likely to be such an overwhelming winner in theaters this weekend that its performance will really determine how the overall market looks. We’ll certainly have the best weekend since theaters started reopening, and probably triple the top-six earnings from last weekend. We’ll have a much better picture tomorrow when Warner Bros. says they will release a Friday estimate for the first time in ages.

Bruce Nash

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Godzilla vs. Kong, The Unholy