Paramount’s video game adaptation Street Fighter is forecast to lead the North American box office this weekend with $25 million to $35 million, a week after Other Mommy opened to $27.5 million.
Paramount’s Street Fighter, an adaptation of the Capcom fighting game, is projected to open at the top of the North American box office this weekend, 16 to 18 October, with estimated earnings of $25 million to $35 million from about 3,500 theatres, according to a Variety box office preview as summarised in search results. Other trackers are lower: a forecast from Box Office Theory puts the film at $22 million to $25 million or more, and a headline from Boxoffice Pro refers to a $30 million-plus debut.
The range of forecasts is wide, and some outlets have said that tracking has slid ahead of the opening. A headline on one entertainment site says that the film’s tracking has slid and that this raises questions about its large budget, though that article was not reviewed and the budget is not given in the sources used here. The forecasts are projections made before the weekend, and the actual figures will be published on Sunday.
Disney’s survival thriller Whalefall is expected to take second place with $10 million to $12 million from 3,065 theatres, according to the same summary. The weekend’s other new release, You Can See Everything, could start with about $8 million, according to the Variety headline, and a film called Sense and Sensibility is mentioned in the headlines of the Box Office Theory and Boxoffice Pro previews, though its release details were not reviewed.
The previous weekend belonged to Universal’s Other Mommy, a horror film starring Jessica Chastain, which opened with $27.5 million, according to headlines from NBC News and Gold Derby. The pre-weekend projection had been $17 million to $22 million, according to Boxoffice Pro, so the film beat the forecast by several million dollars. Headlines from IndieWire and others credit viral marketing for the result.
Audiences were less enthusiastic than the box office suggests. A JoBlo headline says that Other Mommy is a hit for Blumhouse but that audiences gave it a D+ CinemaScore. A CinemaScore of that level is unusual for a film that opens strongly, and films with grades that low tend to fall sharply in the second weekend, though the sources reviewed do not give the film’s second-weekend numbers, which will be known on Sunday.
The same weekend saw the opening of The Social Reckoning, which made $5.5 million according to the NBC News headline, and which Gold Derby describes as bombing. The film landed in the top five according to a No Bad Movie headline, which shows how thin the box office was behind the winner.
Mid-October is usually a quiet period for the box office, as the Box Office Theory headline suggests when it calls the weekend a sleepy mid-October frame. A $30 million opening would be a solid result for a game adaptation, but the sources do not say what the studio needs to break even, so the commercial verdict cannot be given.
Video game films have had mixed results in recent years, and the studios treat each new one as a test of whether a fan base will turn out in cinemas. The sources reviewed for this article do not give the review scores or the audience reaction for Street Fighter, so the report cannot say whether word of mouth will help it after the opening.
Delima News will report the actual weekend figures when the studios release their estimates on Sunday. Until then, the numbers above are forecasts, and the comparison with Other Mommy’s $27.5 million shows that the new film is expected to open at a similar level.
Image: A cinema marquee (file photo; a stand-in image, not related to the films). Photo: Tim Evanson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
