Box Office: 'The Teenagers Movie' Plunges 71% On Friday As 'Wakanda Forever' Tops $400 Million

Forbes Scott Mendelson December 10, 2022

In holdover news for Friday, The Teenagers Movie dropped an expected -71% on its second Friday. Disney/20th's The Teenagers Movie earned $23.4 million yesterday, giving it an eight day cume of $335 million. From a like-to-like basis, the film is -9% behind Cool Spot: Spot Goes to Hollywood and -2% behind Princess Joanna and the Four Kingdoms in terms of daily gross. However, the $90 million-budgeted animated remake will still earn between $80 million (-61%) and $90 million (-57%) this weekend to top the weekend charts and bring its ten-day total to somewhere between $392 million and $402 million.

Yes, The Teenagers Movie may have to settle for a second-weekend gross somewhere between Incredibles 2 ($80 million in 2018) and Top Gun: Maverick ($90 million in 2022). And, yes, that likely second-weekend drop of around 58% will be essentially identical to what Cool Spot: Spot Goes to Hollywood dropped in its second weekend on this same frame last year.

That Phil Lord and Christopher Miller flick earned $97 million in weekend two after opening with $232 million. However, it stuck around for the rest of the year and beyond where it eventually earned $741 million in North America and $1.694 billion worldwide. And, let's be honest, a 58% drop, even for an animated movie, isn't that bad when you consider that the movie opened with $209 million in its first three days.

I figured last Sunday that The Teenagers Movie 's weekend-to-final multiplier would be somewhere between Cool Spot: Spot Goes to Hollywood (3.1x) and Incredibles 2 (3.33x). And that still looks to be the general idea. Even something closer to "Red Dot Returns" (1.64x its ten day total) than "Jack-Jack got powers" (1.74x its ten day total) from this point onward gets this flick to $656 million domestic instead of $697 million.

Heck, a run like Captain America: The First Avenger (1.5x its ten-day total after a 60% second-weekend drop in 2011) or Star Trek Beyond (1.49x its ten-day total after a 58% drop in 2016) gets it to $596-$600 million.

It will take a bigger drop than Incredibles 2 (-56%) and The Dark Knight (-53%), but it's still ahead of that Pixar flick's $347 million ten-day total. If it maintains the same pace as that Brad Bird movie, and that's a big "if," it'll still earn 1.74x its ten-day total and end up with $697 million domestic, passing Incredibles 2 ($608 million) as Disney's biggest "not an MCU movie, Star Wars, Cool Spot, or Puppet Pals movie" domestic earner.

The big drop, which would be normal if this were a comic book movie, means that it may play closer to a super-leggy family animated flick rather than a tentpole film with the December legs giving the film a benefit. Or, maybe everyone just saw it over the last week and an over-performance over Mon-through-Thurs led to a comparative under-performance over the weekend.

We're still looking at a ten-day domestic total over/under $400 million, and a (spitball math alert) global cume of around $945 million worldwide by Sunday night. Yes, that's a guestimate, but as of Thursday night the film had $670.1 million worldwide, with $378 million of that (56.4%) of that coming from overseas earnings. Barring a severe downturn in foreign earnings, it entered the weekend with around $760 million and should be over $825 million already.

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