Weekend projections: Civil War holds strong through weekend to pull off easy win

A24’s big bet on Civil War is paying off handsomely as the action thriller is holding on strongly through the weekend to post an opening weekend now projected at $25.7 million, about 12% more than our Friday-morning prediction. Our baseline for this movie, based on the performance of director Alex Garland’s previous films, A24’s record at the box office, and similar recent sci-fi action movies, was $8.8 million. We already knew the film would top that figure going into the weekend, but this is an excellent result for an entirely new film about a controversial subject.

Here’s how the weekend numbers look as of Sunday morning (click on the image for the full chart of films reporting so far)…

Civil War’s performance is very slightly better than the “previews only” prediction we issued on Friday, meaning that word of mouth is decent: the film has a B- from CinemaScore, for example. Where it goes from here is hard to predict, but the model believes $60 million is the target based on its first weekend.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire ends its run at the top of the chart with $158 million or so in the bank domestically, and another $279 million internationally. The model thinks it will just hit $200 million domestically by the end of its run here, and it should manage $550 million or so worldwide.

Godzilla, Dune: Part Two, and Monkey Man all lost ground this weekend thanks to competition with Civil War.

A couple of films made surprise debuts in the top 10. The Long Game, a golf drama timed to coincide with this weekend’s Masters tournament is looking at an 8th place finish with $1.39 million, and creature feature Sting will land in tenth with $1.2 million. The former is the first release for Mucho Mas Media (and it’s very rare for a studio to hit the top 10 with their first release, so congratulations to them!). The latter is the second top ten film for Well Go USA, who managed the same feat with The Wandering Earth 2 in January last year.

– Studio weekend projections

– All-time top-grossing movies in North America

– All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

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