Weekend predictions: How to Train Your Dragon heading to roaring opening

How to Train Your Dragon looks like a good bet to post the third-best weekend of the year after a strong set of previews on Wednesday and Thursday. Whether it can hit $100 million on debut, like Lilo & Stitch and A Minecraft Movie, will depend heavily on how it performs through the tail-end of the weekend.

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

Spin-offs and remakes tend to do a little worse than previous films from a franchise, but it’s been long enough since a How to Train Your Dragon movie hit theaters that the film is largely aiming for a new audience. More specifically, a new generation of families.

Our audience tracking for Dragon has been quite strong since we first ran a prediction for it about a year ago. That buzz hasn’t quite trended higher in the way that we saw for Minecraft and Lilo & Stitch, but we’ve been confident of a good opening for quite a while.

The previews point towards a very good opening…

The fact that $2.5 million was earned from special screenings on Wednesday, and $8.6 million from previews last night, complicates the task of modeling the opening weekend. Suffice it to say that we can probably expect a weekend close to $100 million, but it’ll take unusually good legs to hit nine figures. A multiplier of 11.34 from Thursday’s number, to be precise. That wouldn’t be a huge number by historical standards, but anything over 10 can be considered good these days.

One big factor is Father’s Day on Sunday. This is a good Father-son movie, for sure, which could help. On the flip side, many families might opt for a Barbecue if the weather’s good… we’ll know more tomorrow, but something between $90 million and $100 million looks likeliest based on the numbers we’ve seen so far.

Meanwhile, Materialists is looking to thread the romantic comedy needle this weekend.

Our baseline prediction is heavily influenced by our model’s assessment of audience buzz. If I’m honest, it felt high to me. Then the preview numbers came in…

While $1.5 million in the bank isn’t a lot of money in absolute terms, it is a promising result for a romantic comedy, and points to a weekend comfortably over $10 million. That would be a great result for opening weekend.

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

Ballerina’s second-weekend drop is quite high by the model’s standards (it tends to be a quite cautious about predicting anything more than 60% unless a film is really slumping). I think we could see it come in well below $10 million, but we’ll see.

A couple of films are notable for their absence from the chart above. That’s partly because we don’t have an official theater count for The Life of Chuck, but even with our model’s estimated count it isn’t expected to hit the top 10 after its relatively soft opening in limited release. Something around $1 million is the best bet, but maybe it can still pick up a following. This weekend is its last chance, I think.

Likewise, The Unholy Trinity looks unlikely to top $1 million as it opens in 771 theaters for Roadside Attractions.

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