Weekend predictions: Monkey takes on Captain America

February 21, 2025

The Monkey

Osgood Perkins’ follow-up to 2024’s indie hit Longlegs lands in theaters this weekend. The Monkey isn’t expected to do the kind of business earned by the director’s previous movie, but it looks like it will have a solid opening this weekend. Captain America: Brave New World looks unlikely to knocked from the top of the chart though.

Here’s our model’s fundamentals prediction for The Monkey…

Longlegs is a huge outlier for distributor Neon, and doesn’t move the dial much for the model’s baseline prediction. The fact that it’s playing in 3,200 theaters means it should perform better than their typical film—1,800 to 2,000 is a more usual pattern for them. But what boosts the prediction hugely is our measure of audience interest.

It looks as though the audience adjustment is right in line with what’s happening in theaters so far, at least based on Thursday previews:

Something in the mid-teens looks a good bet, and will further cement Neon’s status as a major distributor.

Meanwhile, The Unbreakable Boy looks like it will pull in minor business for Lionsgate.

Here’s what the model thinks the top 10 will look like.

Captain America: Brave New World should top the chart easily, but it might struggle to have the kind of hold shown above, particularly with a modest audience response and coming off a long weekend. Conversely, Paddington in Peru could hold on a little better.

Overall, the question this weekend is how much the market will contract compared to last weekend’s surprisingly strong Presidents’ Day weekend. The model pegged that over-performance at 18%, and this weekend’s predictions assume that effect will go away. We might see a stronger drop than that.

A couple of wrinkles in this weekend’s prediction are that we don’t have theater counts for Becoming Led Zeppelin or Ne Zha 2. In the former case, I’ve plugged last weekend’s theater count into the prediction. In the latter case, we also don’t have official reported box office. I think Ne Zha will hit the top 10, but we don’t have enough information to give even an approximate prediction for the film.

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Bruce Nash,

Filed under: Weekend Preview, Becoming Led Zeppelin, The Unbreakable Boy, Captain America: Brave New World, The Monkey, Paddington in Peru, Ne Zha 2 (哪吒之魔童闹海), Oz Perkins