Weekend predictions: Halloween Ends eyes $50-million opening
October 14, 2022
After 44 years and 14 films, the Halloween franchise ends this weekend with the appropriately-titled Halloween Ends. Of course, horror franchises have a habit of rising from the grave, so the demise of the franchise is a very tentative prediction. Its box office prospects look a little clearer though, with an opening around $50 million looking very much on the cards.
Here’s what the model thought of the film’s prospects going into the weekend.
Although generally the model tries to find a large number of comparable films when making a prediction, for franchise films it’s almost always safest to look at the previous installments as a point of reference even if there aren’t many of them. 2018’s Halloween and 2021’s Halloween Kills both did excellently on opening weekend. In fact, Halloween Kills can lay claim to the best opening weekend for a horror movie in the post-pandemic era, with the model converting its actual $49.4 million debut into a pandemic-adjusted $98.8 million.
What’s holding back the new release are the current pandemic adjustment, which assumes that only 56% of regular moviegoers are currently going to theaters, and somewhat soft audience tracking. I personally think our model is underestimating the current audience due to a long run of middling to poor releases since late Summer, but there’s no question new films are facing some headwinds at the moment.
The Thursday preview numbers improve the outlook…
The previous two installments earned almost exactly ten times their preview take over their opening weekends. That points towards a weekend safely, but not massively, over $50 million for Halloween Ends. There’s an argument to be made that the core audience for the film will have showed up in higher numbers on Thursday to see for themselves the answer to the question, “Is this really the end of the franchise?” Our fundamentals prediction serves the task of moderating the preview prediction in that regard, and gives us a final number of $51.8 million.
Here’s what our model thinks the top 10 as a whole will look like…
Halloween will clearly dominate this weekend, with Smile pretty much guaranteed second place, although the top two are competing very directly against one another. I think Smile could be hurt by that and fall more than 31%, but it’ll have to fall by a lot to be troubled by Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile in its second weekend in release.
One wildcard this weekend is TÁR, which is expanding to 36 theaters, and looks likely to just make it into the top 10. Till is another film that could sneak into the list, although it’ll have to do exceptionally well in all 16 theaters it’ll play in as it opens to make it onto the chart.
Filed under: Weekend Preview, Halloween Ends, Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, Till, TÁR, Smile, Halloween