Weekend predictions: Expend4bles won’t do much to help at the box office

September 22, 2023

Expend4bles

Expend4bles looked like it might be an unnecessary return to theaters for a franchise that last produced a movie nine years ago, and the results from Thursday’s preview screenings don’t look promising, with just $750,000 earned so far. All is not entirely lost, as this franchise has rarely had huge audiences on preview night, and our model still thinks it will win the weekend. Earning enough to improve the market as a whole looks well beyond it though, as the Fall slump continues at the box office.

Since it’s so long since we have had an Expendables movie, the model only considered its most recent outing in constructing a prediction for the weekend:

Arguably The Expendables 3 is so long ago that we should be adjusting its opening for inflation, even though the model does better in general when opening weekends are not adjusted for inflation. Our audience tracking adjustment kind of does that for us in this case, with current audience enthusiasm pointing towards a weekend close to $20 million.

The preview numbers for Expend4bles are remarkably consistent with the rest of the films in the franchise. All of them have earned between $725,000 and $875,000 on their first evening. In that context, $750,000 doesn’t look too bad. The 10-year cut-off rule for comps means that the model expects a Thursday-to-weekend multiplier of 18.15, but coming close to $30 million this weekend would be consistent with the performances of The Expendables 2 and The Expendables.

The bottom line is that the preview number doesn’t appear to be especially predictive for this franchise. However, the multipliers are consistent with the general trend for franchises to get lower previews-to-weekend multipliers with each successive film.

Overall, I’m fairly comfortable with a prediction for the weekend of $14.8 million.

Two other films hit wide release this weekend. It Lives Inside will be opening in 1,985 theaters, which is the widest release yet for its distributor, Neon.

Based on how it’s doing so far, the film looks like it should make it into the top ten.

Finally, Dumb Money expands into 616 theaters this weekend. The model doesn’t think it’ll hit the top ten (yet—it expands more next weekend), but it has a chance to do so…

The challenge for Dumb Money is that it’s playing in just 616 theaters this weekend. That’s technically enough for us to consider it a wide release, but not enough to expect a massive jump from its opening.

My hunch is that it’ll do a bit better than the model is predicting, but word of mouth will be critical to its success over the next few weeks.

Here’s what the model thinks that top 10 will look like.

Overall, we’re looking at another very slow weekend at the box office. As long as Expend4bles can get over $10 million we should see a total weekend high enough to keep things above the $51.7 million earned by all films over the weekend of February 10. The record for the worst weekend of 2023 is in slight danger of being broken though.

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Filed under: Weekend Preview, Expend4bles, Dumb Money, The Expendables