UPDATED, Friday afternoon: Two animated movies, Disney/Pixar’s Elemental and Sony Animation’s monolith Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, have punked The Flash and are in a fierce fight for No. 1 at the weekend box office with about $18 million apiece after Fridays that are estimated around $5.4M each.
If a bulk of those figures stick, Elemental, which posted one of the lowest openings for a Pixar movie in recent memory at $29.6M (though not as low as the first Toy Story, which did $29.1M), will see a second weekend ease of -39%, which isn’t that bad. That will get its 10-day take to $65M at 4,035 theaters, which is $5M more than the pandemic disaster Onward.
Meanwhile, there’s no such thing as superhero fatigue with Across the Spider-Verse easing 33% in its fourth weekend, swinging its running total by EOD Sunday to $315.8M at 3,785 theaters. By Sunday, Across the Spider-Verse will be pacing 14% ahead of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man: Homecoming (which finaled at $334.2M) and 5% behind Spider-Man: Far From Home (which finaled at $390.5M stateside). Wow, wow, wow.
Meanwhile, Warner Bros/DC’s The Flash is looking at a second Friday of $4.3M and second weekend of $14M, right now down a massive 75%. Should that hold, it will be worse than the 66% second-weekend drop weathered by Warner Bros/DC’s Green Lantern back in 2011. The running total for Flash by Sunday will be around $86.3M at 4,256 theaters.
Flash could lose third to Sony’s new R-rated Jennifer Lawrence comedy No Hard Feelings which has a shot at $14M-$15M after a $5.3M Friday at 3,208 theaters.
Fifth place goes to Paramount’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts with a third Friday of $3M, a three-day of $10.6M, -49%, and a running total of $121.9M. Yes, the seventh robots-in-disguise film will definitely beat out the domestic gross of the last two Transformers movies: Last Knight at $130.1M and Bumblebee at $127.1M.