Weekend predictions: Smile is third film in three weeks to take a crack at a $20-million opening

September 30, 2022

Smile

After a $19-million opening for The Woman King two weeks ago, and a $19.4-million debut for Don’t Worry, Darling last weekend, Smile is hoping to become the first film of the Fall Season to crack $20 million on opening weekend. Its chances are good, based on its Thursday previews, but it’s far from certain to hit the mark.

Here’s what the model thought of its prospects going into the weekend.

R-rated horror movies from the major studios tend to start out with around $10 million on opening weekend, but it’s not unusual to a film to do quite a bit better than that. The model’s pandemic adjustment is quite low right now (thanks to a series of modest performances at the end of the Summer Season), but audience interest in Smile is high, which boosts the predicted weekend by almost $5 million.

A $15-million predicted opening puts $20 million well within reach, and the previews look good…

The issue for Smile is that it needs a preview multiplier of 9.5 to hit $20 million this weekend. That’s undoubtedly doable, but preview numbers have flattered to deceive recently, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they do so again this weekend. So, an opening around $20 million looks very much on the cards, but my money would be on another film missing that target by a narrow margin.

Bros, meanwhile, is looking for an eight-figure opening, based on fundamentals and its audience interest going into the weekend.

Its preview numbers tell basically the same story…

Romantic comedies tend to have high multipliers compared to their Thursday preview earnings, so a modest-looking $500,000 isn’t a death knell for this film, and the model still thinks it should hit $10 million. The fact that it’s an R-rated, LGBTQ+ romantic comedy complicates the prediction, since we’ve not seen anything exactly like it before. In general, novelty (whether it’s a new distributor, or a genre-bending plot, or anything else) tends to reduce box office earnings. But there are many instances where the reverse has been true. I think Bros may have a slightly lower than usual previews-to-weekend multiplier, since its core target audience may have gone to check it out last night. If that’s the case, it’ll come in with more like $8 million or $9 million. That’s hardly a disaster, but $10 million would be a great psychological barrier to cross.

Here’s what our model thinks the top 10 as a whole will look like…

The top two films could come in well behind their predictions and we’d still have an “up” weekend at the box office. I think the top 10 will earn closer to $55 million than the $62.6 million being predicted right now, with Smile and Bros both falling a little short of the model’s predictions. But we’ve had enough new films recently to keep the overall box office fairly bouyant.

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Don’t Worry, Darling, Bros, The Woman King, Smile