Though Disney didn’t release a film until March 8th of this year, it is already the highest grossing movie studio of the year, primarily based off of the success of Captain Marvel. While these seems great at the moment, it is simply child’s play when compared to the amount of money that Avengers: Endgame will make when it debuts in just about a week. But before we jump to Endgame, let’s take a look at the Disney film that everyone forgot was being released this year.
Every few years on Earth Day, people remember that DisneyNature exists. Within a week, people generally tend to forget the film existed, (myself included), but this year, I’m actually going to go out and watch this year’s film, Penguins and hopefully other ones once they are released on Disney+. So without further ado, let’s take a look at how Penguins will perform this weekend.
Currently, there aren’t too many box office predictions for the film out there because of its smaller budget and opening on a Wednesday instead of the typical Friday, so I’m here to help with that rundown. Though the film doesn’t have much information on it, we can look back to some of the other DisneyNature films that Disney has released.
Without much to compare things to, I am currently leaning towards a $1.1 million Wednesday and an $890,000 Thursday before starting out on Easter Weekend. Many schools are on spring break towards the end of this week, so that will help increase attendance on Wednesday through Saturday, but then I anticipate that the holiday on Sunday will dig into the box office a bit.
With all of that in mind, I’m predicting a weekend box office of $4.78 million for Penguins bringing the film’s total gross to $6.7 million at weekend’s end.
Via Roger Ebert
With the total weekend prediction handled, let’s take a closer look at how Penguins will fare each day. I started by looking at each of the different DisneyNature films before focusing my attention on Born in China, Monkey Kingdom, Oceans and Earth.
Born in China and Monkey Kingdom were obvious choices as the most recent DisneyNature films with grosses nearly identical to my prediction for Penguins. Oceans and Earth were the first couple of DisneyNature films, so they aren’t the best comparisons because they were both released a while ago. However, these were the only two films that were not released on a Friday, so how their weekends played out should provide some information about how we can expect Penguins to perform. (Though they did have the benefit of releasing on Earth Day rather than before.)
| Day | Born in China | Monkey Kingdom | Oceans | Earth | Average | |||||
| Change | %Gross | Change | %Gross | Change | %Gross | Change | %Gross | Change | %Gross | |
| Friday | — | 33.02% | — | 33.85% | — | 33.93% | — | 32.78% | — | 33.40% |
| Saturday | 22.65% | 40.50% | 7.42% | 36.36% | 4.20% | 35.36% | 13.83% | 37.32% | 12.03% | 37.38% |
| Sunday | -35.62% | 26.48% | -18.09% | 29.79% | -13.14% | 30.71% | -19.89% | 29.90% | -21.44% | 29.22% |
As you can see, there is a lot of information to sort through, but I felt that Born in China and Monkey Kingdom were certainly the best comparisons because there is not as large of a market for DisneyNature films today (even with documentaries seeing a resurgence). However, I did base the day by day totals more on Oceans and Earth, so I could take into account the people seeing the film on Wednesday or Thursday.
Bringing all of this data together, I’m expecting a $1.61 million Friday, which would represent about 33.78% of the box office for the weekend, slightly above the average base off of previous weekends. On Saturday, I’m looking at a gross of $1.81 million, representing an increase of 12% and 37.84% of the weekend gross, again a little above average. I think that we are sure to see Saturday as the highest grossing day of the weekend because Saturdays usually are higher grossing than Fridays, particularly for family-friendly films. Finally, I think we’ll see a bit of a steeper drop on Sunday to $1.35 million. The drop of 25% will lead to 28.38% of the gross, so a bit lower than average. With Easter taking families away from the box office, it seems like a safe bet that Sunday will have a steeper drop.
All in all, I think that Penguins will do just about as well as its predecessors, especially with a Rotten Tomatoes score in the low 90s. I hope that it will do better than I expected, but we’ll see what happens when the finalized results come out on Monday.