Weekend Preview: DEADPOOL and ALIEN to Once Again Rule the Weekend

Courtesy of Disney/Marvel Studios

The Boxoffice Podium

Forecasting the Top 3 Movies at the Domestic Box Office | August 30 – September 1, 2024

Week 35 | August 30 – September 1, 2024
Top 10 3-Day Range | Weekend 35, 2024: $40M — $75M

1. Deadpool & Wolverine
Marvel Studios | Week 6
Weekend Range: $8M – $12M
Showtime Marketshare: 10%

Pros

  • Earning another $1.7M domestically on Monday, Marvel Studios’ Deadpool & Wolverine is now at $578.9M and counting. There’s a serious chance it could smash 2012’s The Avengers domestically ($623.3M) if Beetlejuice Beetlejuice doesn’t knock the wind out of its sails, but the real story is how huge this movie is playing overseas. At $1,213.4B, it has, in all likelihood, surpassed Iron Man 3’s $1,215.3B by now to become the 7th highest-grossing MCU movie globally once those international numbers come in. It remains the second-highest global release of 2024 behind Inside Out 2 ($1,646.8B), posting strong holds in markets like the UK (-25%), Spain (-27%), and Australia (-32%).

Cons

  • Labor Day is a traditionally weak weekend at the end of the summer season, so attendance may drop off precipitously in general and for this title specifically. Whether that means Deadpool will lose its #1 status to a horror newcomer (Afraid) just like it did two weeks ago with Alien: Romulus remains to be seen, but it is a possibility given the razor-thin margins we’re predicting for the Top 3 this week.

2. Alien: Romulus
20th Century Studios | Week 3
Weekend Range: $6M – $10M
Showtime Marketshare: 8%

Pros

  • With $74.3M in the tank domestically, Alien: Romulus will certainly breeze past 2004’s AVP: Alien Vs. Predator ($80.2M) this week to become the #3 earner in the franchise. Likewise, at $226.8M WW, it should overtake 2017’s Alien: Covenant ($238.5M), soon to become the #2 movie in the series globally. There’s no question this movie has reinvigorated the franchise, with just enough fan service plus intriguing new additions to the mythology to keep the series going theatrically.
  • One very bright light in this movie’s performance has been the way it has popped in China, earning $19.7M this past weekend, more than it made in North America. That represents a drop of only -25% from its opening ($26.2M), when it came out ahead of Japanese anime title Detective Conan: The Million Dollar Pentagram and Chinese crime movie Go for Broke. With $73.3M in the Middle Kingdom to date, Alien: Romulus is the second-highest grossing MPA film of the year behind Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire. That figure is close to doubling Covenant‘s lifetime Chinese performance ($45.5M), while Prometheus didn’t even have a Chinese release. By comparison, Deadpool & Wolverine has made $58.6M in China while Inside Out 2 took in $47.1M. Easily the film’s #1 foreign market, the #2 is the U.K. with only $10.7M.

Cons

  • The big question now is if Alien: Romulus can best Ridley Scott’s Prometheus in terms of domestic ($126.4M) or global ($402.4M) take? Not likely on either front, which says something for Scott’s approach to that 2012 blockbuster by not including the traditional xenomorph aliens, thus making it almost an original movie more loosely related to the other Alien installments. With a 45-year-old IP, it becomes difficult to grow an audience without rebooting, and director Fede Álvarez went the opposite direction with Romulus by including nods to every film in the saga. While sci-fi fans love to do their homework, a movie that relies on nostalgia for six prior films also carries a lot of baggage, which is why Romulus can only fly so far.

3. Afraid
Sony Pictures | NEW
Weekend Range: $6M – $10M
Showtime Marketshare: 9%

Pros

  • For the past two weekends, the trifecta of Deadpool, Alien, and the romantic drama It Ends With Us have proved to be a firewall against any theatrical newcomers. That wall might be penetrated this weekend as Sony Pictures teams with Blumhouse to deliver the timely horror picture Afraid (stylized as “AfrAId”). Not only is the AI-oriented, Alexa-from-hell subject matter as hot button as it gets, but you have big talent in front of the camera (John Cho, Katherine Waterston) as well as behind (writer/director Chris Weitz of About a Boy and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story). Casting Cho, in particular, was a smart move given his previous success headlining the computer-oriented screenlife thriller Searching (2018), which took in $75.6M worldwide on a low budget.
  • Our prediction panel has this movie neck-and-neck with Romulus, but the potential of Afraid to have a late rally similar to Longlegs is real. There’s a solid possibility it could break out, shooting ahead of Alien or even Deadpool if those two films pull in fewer people than anticipated. Sony has been making mountains out of molehills this summer with below-summer-tentpole-budgeted releases like Bad Boys: Ride or Die, The Garfield Movie, and It Ends With Us, so if anyone can help Afraid surge in the last week of the sunny season, it’s them.

Cons

  • Afraid may become a victim of family animation titles already in circulation getting an end-of-summer last-gasp boost in screen counts and showtimes. With Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 making one last run for the Top 10 before schools resume in September, a PG-13 movie like Afraid might lose some of the younger teens and tweens.
  • Jason Blum’s Blumhouse shingle has long been the flagbearer for making small-scale horror flicks that earn big, but so far their 2024 has been lackluster with Imaginary ($28M domestic) and Night Swim ($32.4M). Those two originals certainly don’t look to have sparked any new franchises, paling in comparison to previous hits like M3GAN ($95.1M) or The Black Phone ($90.1M) and likely relying on foreign/ancillary markets to make back their P&A spends. Hopefully, Afraid will be the kind of zeitgeist-hitting scare-fest we’ve come to expect from this company. Sony’s previous summer horror release, Tarot, was DOA, so critical reaction might play big into Afraid‘s ultimate upside/downside.
Courtesy of Disney/Marvel Studios

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