The box office battle between Disney’s Mufasa – the Lion King prequel – and Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3 seems to be over before it even began. According to Deadline, Sonic 3 more than doubled Mufasa’s grosses, with a $70.5 million opening (which is right in line with what we predicted). However, Mufasa is under-performing badly, with it on track for an opening weekend in the $36-8 million range. When you consider that the 2019 Lion King opened with $191 million, that’s a truly abysmal number, although, with the Christmas season in full swing, it should still have no trouble topping at least $100 million domestically. It did manage an A-minus CinemaScore rating, so word-of-mouth should be decent and give it legs into 2025.

Meanwhile, Moana 2 and Wicked are neck-in-neck, with each expecting to pull in around $14 million for the weekend. However, the movie in 5th place is a pretty big shock, with Sony’s pricey Kraven the Hunter on track to drop an obscene 72% this weekend, for a 7th place finish behind Gladiator II. In fact, Angel Studios’ faith-based Homestead, which is basically a feature-length pilot for their new streaming series, is going to wind up in the top five, grossing a very respectable $5.5 million on less than 2000 screens. While it won’t wind up as one of their top grossers, this is a solid number, with Angel having a knack for appealing to the faith-based audience, although none of their films since Sound of Freedom has really crossed over to mainstream audiences. 

Another movie tanking badly this weekend is Lord of the Rings: The War of Rohirrim, which is also on track to lose at least 70% of its audience for a ninth-place finish. It likely won’t even pass $10 million domestically. OUCH. That said, Kraven is still the bigger bomb of the two, with it sporting a $125 million price tag. It likely won’t top $25 million domestically, which makes it a far bigger bomb than Madame Web.

What are you seeing this weekend? Let us know in the comments!

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