Weekend estimates: The Suicide Squad top with $26.5 million on disappointing weekend for the industry
August 8, 2021
Cannibalization from HBO Max? An R-rated super hero movie that suffered because it couldn’t reach family audiences? Renewed reluctance to go to movies as the Delta Variant hits hard across the continent? Whatever the reasons (and it’s most likely a combination of all three), The Suicide Squad will open with a disappointing $26.5 million this weekend, according to Warner Bros.’ Sunday-morning projection. While singling out the performance of a single movie makes for an easy headline, what’s perhaps more concerning for the industry today is that six out of the top eight films missed our model’s prediction, which suggests that the market recovery we were hoping for is stalling out.
A few weeks ago, our model predicted a $64-million opening weekend for The Suicide Squad. Although the pace of the recovery has slowed since then, it still thought the film should have posted about $57 million this weekend, based on a comparison with the performance of other R-rated and DC Extended Universe super-hero movies. Thursday’s previews showed that to be an overly-rosy expectation, but still thought the film was a good bet for $28 million this weekend, and possibly higher.
Today’s estimate shows that the movie was quite heavily front-loaded, with movie-going skewed towards Thursday evening. In other words, it looks as though a “hardcore” group of fans showed up on opening night, but a lot of the more casual audience decided to what Suicide Squad on HBO Max in the comfort of their own homes. Perhaps the only question is whether this was COVID-related, or just due to the nature of the film.
We can’t know for sure how much Suicide Squad’s performance was down to lukewarm general interest (at least not unless Warner Bros. releases some viewership figures for the HBO Max release), but there’s good reason to suspect that COVID played a part: the performance of the returning films this weekend was also worse than has been usual during the pandemic. Ignoring Suicide Squad, the top eight was down by about 10% more than expected. That would correspond to our model’s estimate of the current theatrical audience compared to normal declining from about 50% to about 45% in one week. While that’s probably overstating things, it does seem likely that the market is softening as public messaging increasingly warns against going to confined spaces with other people.
Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com
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Filed under: Weekend Estimates, The Suicide Squad