Weekend estimates: Universal movies dominate July 4 weekend

July 4, 2021

F9: The Fast Saga

The long July 4 weekend is being dominated by one studio (and for once it’s not Disney). Universal Pictures are reaping the rewards of releasing three high-profile films in two weeks. F9: The Fast Saga will top the chart for a second weekend with a projected $24-million three-day weekday that takes the action movie to $117 million in total so far, the second-highest earnings for a film during 2021 domestically. The Boss Baby: Family Business is headed for second place with $17.36 million, and The Forever Purge will be third with $12.75 million. All three films are coming in somewhat behind our model’s Friday predictions.





In fact, almost every film is falling short of what the model expected, at least over the Friday to Sunday portion of the weekend. Whether this reflects a pause in market growth (possibly related to some flattening or increasing of COVID-19 case rates in some parts of the US), or a more leisurely weekend due to the holiday on Monday is something that only time will tell.

The last time a studio claimed the three top-grossing films of the weekend was back in February, 2005, when Sony Pictures pulled off the feat. Naming the three films would be a crazily hard trivia question, so I’ll spare you the agony by revealing that the top three that weekend consisted of Hitch, Boogeyman, and Are We There Yet?.

Note that technically IFC Films had the top three films in the chart over the weekend of April 17 last year, but it was the only distributor reporting at the time so won by default—the films at the top of the chart were actually not the top-grossing movies that weekend as other films were playing in drive-in theaters but not reporting grosses.

Prior to Sony’s feat in 2005, The Fugitive’s long run at number one helped Warner Bros. earn the top three on two weekends in August and September, 1993. No studio has ever had the top four movies over a weekend, but Warner Bros. managed four out of the top five (and a record-equaling five in the top 10) on the weekend of August 27, 1993 and Paramount also had four of the top five films the weekends of January 16 and January 23, 1987.

In the more recent past, the July 4 weekend has often been dominated by a major tentpole release. Spider-Man: Far From Home opened with $92.6 million over the Friday to Sunday part of the weekend in 2019, for example, and Ant-Man and the Wasp collected $75.8 million in 2018. We don’t have a film of that scale this year, and the weekend has traditionally been fairly soft for films not opening (Toy Story 4 fell 43% in its third weekend in 2019, for instance). We don’t know much yet about how holiday weekends will work in the post-pandemic world but this weekend’s results aren’t much out of line with what’s been seen traditionally, once we adjust for the smaller in-theater audience at the moment.

There’s still reason for caution as we look ahead, but Black Widow will answer a lot of questions next weekend, when we should see the market as a whole bounce back to more than $100 million for all films reporting for the first time during the pandemic era. Whether Black Widow can top F9’s $70-million opening is something I’ll be looking at closely this week.

- Weekend studio estimates

Bruce Nash,

Filed under: Weekend Estimates, F9: The Fast Saga, The Boss Baby: Family Business, Black Widow, The Forever Purge