Weekend predictions: 28 Years and Elio start out strong, but final weekend results uncertain

28 Years Later and Elio have both posted strong preview numbers, with Sony reporting $5.8 million for the horror movie, and Disney picking up $3 million from Pixar’s latest offering. How that will translate into final weekend numbers depends on two factors. As usual, word-of-mouth and general momentum play a major role, but this weekend we have the added complication of Juneteenth falling on Thursday. That will have boosted box office, but we don’t know by how much exactly. How to Train Your Dragon is widely viewed as the favorite to win the weekend, but there’s still some room for a surprise.

Here are the model’s predictions, as of Friday lunchtime, starting with the “baseline” prediction for 28 Years Later, which was constructed before we had hard data on ticket sales…

Our audience tracking for this title has been fairly consistently higher than the industry consensus. The preview numbers are making the model look good this morning…

If Juneteenth added $1 million to receipts for 28 Years, its predicted weekend lands much closer to $40 million. If it’s heavily front-loaded, which seems possible given it’s not a “normal” horror movie, then it could well fall short of $40 million. The numbers I’ve seen this week were much closer to $35 million. To me, it looks as though it’ll outperform that number, but by how much is really hard to tell. Alien: Romulus might be a good benchmark, and, if it is, we’re look at a weekend around $37 million.

Likewise, we’ve had pretty good numbers for Elio, based mostly on Pixar’s track record.

The previews are solid too…

Again, the model doesn’t have a “Juneteenth adjustment”, which might have nudged its prediction down below $30 million (assuming about $500,000 of the preview number was a holiday bump). That’s higher than expected. Maybe Elio will be unusually front-loaded for a Pixar film, but topping $25 million seems like a good bet right now.

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

My hunch is that How to Train Your Dragon will come out a winner this weekend, but it could be a fairly close race with 28 Years Later. Elio seems destined for third place. The model looks too bullish to me thanks to a boost from the good timing of the Juneteenth holiday, with something around $37 million for 28 Years and $27 million for Elio seeming to me to be more likely than the numbers quoted above. As usual, I’m deferring to the model.

This is one of the topsy-turvy cases where if the two openers under-perform compared to the model’s expectations, we’ll need to look at a “Juneteenth bump” when we run the numbers next year. If they hit their predicted openings, then Juneteenth wasn’t much of a factor.

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Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com