The Boxoffice Podium
Forecasting the Top 3 Movies at the Domestic Box Office | November 21 – 23, 2025
Week 47 | November 21 – 23, 2025
1. Wicked: For Good
Universal Pictures | NEW
Weekend Range: $145M – $175M
Pros
- Universal is putting all its holiday chips on the musical Wicked: For Good, the sequel to last year’s $474.56M domestic grosser. Arriving at our number was a challenge: tracking and pre-sales have been through the roof, with several major circuits reporting pre-sales they haven’t seen in years. We can see an over-performance considering some of these reports, with a chance this title could exceed our expectations and land in the range of $180 – $210M. Sales comps at this level come in along the lines of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever ($181M) and Deadpool & Wolverine ($211M). The top grossing movies of the year haven’t come anywhere near a performance at such a high level, however, so we are basing our official opening weekend range between $145M – $175M, putting the film around the same level as Lilo & Stitch ($146M) on the low-end and ahead of the Minecraft opening weekend ($162M) on the higher end.
Cons
- We have received a wide range of responses from our forecasting panel vis a vis Wicked: For Good, but there is a nearly unanimous expectation from oir panelists for a debut of $135M as a baseline for the film. We would traditionally include $135M as our bottom range for the title, and we can hardly call that figure a disappointment for the film. The pre-sales trend, however, is driving expectations higher. How high it can fly on opening weekend is anyone’s guess, especially without any real holdover competition. The first Wicked opened to $112.5M this same weekend last year, but then held tremendously in ensuing weeks as it became mother-daughter destination viewing along with a general audience hit as well. Reviews for the sequel (73% on Rotten Tomatoes) are currently not quite up to the level of the first (88%).
2. Now You See Me: Now You Don’t
Lionsgate | Week 2
Weekend Range: $9M – $13M
Pros
- Lionsgate’s threequel Now You See Me: Now You Don’t surpassed initial expectations with a $21M opening that made the best laid plans of a Running Man victory go awry. It was familiarity winning out, and some much-needed #1 optics for a studio that hadn’t had a top spot claim since January. Of course, there is no world where it goes anywhere higher than #2 this weekend, but that gives the studio the chance to reposition it as counter-programming going into Wicked territory.
Cons
- Now You See Me 3 is likely the only other title this weekend to tally above the single millions, but we could see a steep drop with Wicked taking a lot of momentum away. Since this debut was on-par/slightly below the last installment ($22M), there isn’t much in the way of growth to encourage a Now You 4See Me. Our panel also foresees a margin where Running Man could outrun the magicians with a tight race for second, especially since the new Now You See Me was driven by female ticket buyers who are heading in droves to Wicked.
3. The Running Man
Paramount Pictures | Week 2
Weekend Range: $7M – $9M
Pros
- Paramount’s big budget remake of the 1987 quasi-classic The Running Man tripped up at the BO with an anemic $16.49M, as much as $10M off of initial tracking. There were a lot of elements that were beyond the control of filmmaker Edgar Wright, from a mid-stream marketing department switch-up at the studio level to an IP that was, frankly, less-than-beloved. The R-rating and glum dystopian setting may have also represented a failure to read the room, but that doesn’t mean the movie cannot eventually find an audience the way Scott Pilgrim did on home video.
Cons
- Running Man‘s opening weekend was in the lower range of our panel’s forecast, and we believe this will have a hard time finding its footing from here on out. Wright’s last eccentric big budget affair, 2010’s Scott Pilgrim vs the World, also sputtered with a $10.5M opening but has endured over the years thanks to initial positive word of mouth (“A-” from CinemaScore, 84% on Rotten Tomatoes). Contrary to this, Running Man has a middling 66% on RT and a “B+” CinemaScore, and the social rhetoric generally criticizes the film for an unsatisfying third act. That’s less the stuff of “cult classic in the making” but rather an eventual unanswerable trivia question of a movie.
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