Weekend projections: Wild Robot gathers steam through the weekend for strong $35-million debut

The Wild Robot is powering through the weekend to record a feisty $35 million, and an easy win at the box office. After slightly disappointing preview numbers, the film’s audience grew by more than 50% from Friday to Saturday (not counting those Thursday previews as part of Friday’s box office total), and Universal expects it to decline 33% on Saturday. Stellar reviews are clearly driving good word of mouth, and it has earned enough on opening weekend to stay in theaters for an extended run.

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

The standout figure for The Wild Robot is its “weekend multiplier,” which is the ratio between its earnings from previews on Thursday to the final three-day weekend. These multipliers can be quite high for family films, where a lot of business will come from weekend matinées, but they are exceptionally high for The Wild Robot. Here are the best-performing animated films by that metric since 2021, excluding Thanksgiving releases and films that made less than $1 million from previews.

The Bad Guys went on to earn just over 4 times its opening weekend at the domestic box office. If The Wild Robot does the same, it will end its run with around $140 million domestically.

The news is much less good for Megalopolis, which is limping to $4 million this weekend, and losing momentum is it goes. The average CinemaScore for the movie is D+, which is dreadful. It seems like the cinephiles who are intrigued by what Francis Ford Coppola’s dream project looks like have mostly seen it at this point. It might do some business on VoD and continue to be a curiosity for years to come, but its theatrical dreams are over.

The other two standout movies this weekend are the Bollywood title Devara, Part 1, and indie darling My Old Ass. Both are beating our Friday-morning prediction, and have cruised into the top 10. The other new wide releases are all looking soft.

The other film opening this weekend worthing noting is Saturday Night. It is set to earn around $265,000 from just five theaters, which will be enough to give it the second-best theater average of 2024, behind Kinds of Kindness, which debuted with $377,289 from five theaters back in June.

– 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