Weekend predictions: Moana likely to ride wave to another weekend win

Kraven the Hunter and The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim both hit theaters this weekend, but Moana 2 and Wicked will probably ride out the storm to end up numbers one and two at the box office, with the newcomers both landing in the top five.

That’s a disappointing outcome for both Kraven and War of the Rohirrim, which both started out with much bigger ambitions. Audience enthusiasm just isn’t there for either of them though.

Here’s what the model thought of Kraven going into the weekend:

Its previews are actually right in line with the model’s expectations…

Word on the street is that Kraven the Hunter is quite front-loaded and it’ll fade through the weekend. A Thursday–to-weekend multiplier around 8 would take it to a $16 million opening, which is probably a fair benchmark. The model thinks it’ll do better than that. We’ll see.

The model’s original expectation for The War of the Rohirrim was roughly in line with that for Kraven the Hunter, but audience interest just hasn’t been at the required level, and our prediction has been steadily decreasing over the past few months. Going into the weekend, it looked set for something a little short of $15 million.

Preview numbers point to something less than $10 million…

There are some fairly high multipliers among the comparison films, and maybe things will pick up through the weekend. Honestly, hitting $10 million would be a major achievement at this point.

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

There’s a decent chance that Gladiator II will beat War of the Rohirrim for fourth place, but the story of the weekend will remain the excellent continued performance of Moana 2 and Wicked. The fact that this is the next-to-last weekend before the Holidays could pull numbers down for all films, so something under $30 million for Moana and under $25 million for Wicked is probably a fair assumption. That doesn’t change the basic story right now, which is that audiences are back in force at the end of 2024, at least for films that strike the right tone.

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