Box Office Prediction – “The Rise of Skywalker”

You could say that Disney has been having a pretty good year at the box office. Thus far, it has made over $10 billion at the worldwide box office, with Frozen 2 becoming the sixth Disney film of the year to cross $1 billion worldwide. That is a truly astonishing achievement as only 45 films in all of history have ever crossed the billion-dollar mark. In fact, no studio had even had four films cross $1 billion, but the craziest part is that even though the year is almost over, Disney isn’t done yet.

Via Geek Tyrant

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is finally here. I am celebrating the event by attending a Star Wars Marathon at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, which I’ll be diving into here on Laughing Place next week. Along with countless other fans, I am ecstatic to finally see the end of the Skywalker Saga, having had it as a major part of my life ever since I first saw the original as a toddler. The Rise of Skywalker already means a lot to countless people and with the success of The Mandalorian and Rise of the Resistance, it feels like The Rise of Skywalker is coming out at the perfect time.

Via Amazon

Right now, the industry is pegging The Rise of Skywalker’s opening weekend around $200 million, right at the point where it becomes near impossible to make an accurate guess for how it will do. Only seven films have ever eclipsed the $200 million threshold, so we’ve worked our way into mysterious territory. Presales have been pretty robust, though it can be tough to say how much of an impact they will end up having. One area of concern is the backlash surrounding The Last Jedi, with the previous film dividing fans in a few that few movies ever had. Personally, I don’t think that that will affect the opening weekend gross as much as it will affect repeat viewers going forward because most of those people who hated The Last Jedi will still hit theaters this weekend, if only so they can find something new to complain about. Also, reviews did not come out until Wednesday, but with a 58% on Rotten Tomatoes, it has a little more to overcome, though fans will like it according to critics.

With all of that in mind, I’m predicting a total weekend box office of $233.9 million for The Rise of Skywalker.

Via Vox

With the total weekend prediction handled, let’s take a closer look at how I think The Rise of Skywalker will fare each day of the weekend. To help with my predictions, I looked at the big-budget studio films released on this same weekend over the past four years, which includes three Star Wars movies and a superhero movie. I purposely didn’t include Solo because its release over a four day Memorial Day weekend doesn’t make it a very apt comparison.

Using The Force Awakens makes perfect sense because its success brought Star Wars back to the forefront of people’s minds and made this weekend such valuable real estate. Along those same lines of logic, Rogue One and The Last Jedi were both Star Wars films that were released this weekend in the last few weeks, so not including them would make no sense. Finally, the black sheep of this grouping, Aquaman. Normally, I try to stick to Disney comparisons, but the grouping felt empty without a 2018 film, and Aquaman fit the bill the best. It wasn’t the juggernaut that the Star Wars films were, but it did follow a similar pattern to them box office-wise.

Luckily, all of these films told a pretty similar story in terms of how we can expect The Rise of Skywalker to perform day by day. Aquaman played slightly different, but not enough to the point that it needed to be disincluded from the analysis. Those Friday grosses include Thursday night previews for the film, and those Thursday night numbers can make up 30-40% of the total Friday gross on these films. With anticipation so high for the film, I think that we’ll see those Thursday numbers pop again before a pretty drastic drop on Saturday.

Putting it all together, I’m predicting a $107.7 million opening day for 46.28% of the weekend, so playing just below The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. By releasing so close to Christmas, I think it’ll be able to hold pretty well over the course of the weekend. On Saturday, we’ll see a huge decrease for sure, and I’m thinking it’ll be somewhere in the range of 37.3% to $67.5 million, representing 28.86% of the total weekend. Then, we come to Sunday, where I foresee a 13% drop to $58.7 million, 25.11% of the opening weekend. With many people likely taking Monday off, I think that it’ll hold better than Rogue One and The Last Jedi, since people will be inclined to go to the movies later on Sunday.

All in all, I’m sticking with my $233.9 million prediction, but who really knows where it’ll end up. I think it could be anywhere from $200 million to $250 million. Well, we’ll have to check in on Monday and see how this juggernaut is faring.