Weekend predictions: Fantastic Four to stay top, but three openers all doing well

The Fantastic Four: First Steps will have no problems staying top of the box office chart this weekend, with our model predicting a 57% decline from its big $117.6-million opening last weekend. Even a 60% or 70% fall would most likely be enough to keep it ahead of the openers, which look like they will be led by The Bad Guys 2.

Here’s how our predictions line up this week:

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

All three openers are a little hard to predict. For The Bad Guys 2, preview numbers aren’t a very good prediction of opening weekend for animated films. For The Naked Gun, we have very few films to compare it against. Finally, Together is a rare Wednesday opener.

Check in this weekend for updates.

As I mentioned last weekend, our servers are being hammered at the moment by a combination of regular traffic, AI engines (ChatGPT and Claude in particular), and bot armies of unknown provenance (this week we’re seeing around 100,000 systems that claim to be in Iraq furiously scraping the site, using a pattern we’ve previously seen from China and Russia). We’ve been taking steps to manage the load, including blocking access to ChatGPT and Claude, and the bot armies, and reaching out to OpenAI and Anthropic asking them to use our APIs instead of scraping the site. (We’ve not heard back.)

Keeping the site running is proving expensive right now, so if you can help with a small donation ($5/month from all readers like you would allow us to double our capacity and add multiple engineers to our maintenance team), please see the options below.

Please help support The Numbers with a monthly or one-time donation, or by subscribing to The Numbers Business Report. We keep advertising to a minimum, and only for advertisers who we believe are directly of interest to our readers. If you’d like to advertise your movie or service with us, please email us at advertising(at)the-numbers.com.

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