Alien: Romulus debuts this weekend to an expected $70-80 million globally this weekend, as Disney continues dominating the summer box office season, with Deadpool & Wolverine eyeing $1.14 billion and Inside Out 2 building it’s lead past $1.6 billion as 2024’s biggest movie so far.
The Xenomorph returns in “Alien: Romulus.”
I’ll have a review of director Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus (cowritten by Álvarez and his frequent screenwriter partner Rodo Sayagues) for you this weekend.
For a quick financial forecast, I’d say the positive reviews and fan enthusiasm, combined with renewed audience enthusiasm for certain types of genres and franchises that fit the right mold — as Romulus indeed does — will probably help the film land near the higher end of predictions, which is where I think it’ll end up.
If Alien: Romulus plays similar to the early summer sequel hit Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (which finished at nearly $400 million), then 20th Century Studios and Disney should be quite pleased, as the film is modestly budget at just $80 million.
It Ends With Us continues a terrific run, fueled by strong North American attendance more than double the international footprint so far. It will sit around $75 million domestic and $35 million international for about $110 million worldwide through Thursday, and I expect it to easily add another $30 million or more to that global cume through Sunday.
Deadpool & Wolverine should sit near $1.08 billion entering the weekend, and add another roughly $65 million worldwide this weekend. I expect that to be good enough to push the super-sequel toward $1.14 billion. Deadpool & Wolverine topped Joker’s 2019 gross of $1.078 billion on Thursday to become the new highest grossing R-rated box office release in cinema history.
Deadpool & Wolverine also passed Captain Marvel (2019, $1.12 billion) and Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019, $1.13 billion) this weekend as it steadily climbs the Marvel Studio box office charts. It will pass Captain America: Civil War (2016, $1.5 billion) this week, and should eventually top Iron Man 3 (2013, $1.2 billion) to finish as the seventh-highest earning MCU film.
Inside Out 2 topped $1.6 billion at the start of the week, and now appears headed for about $1.625 billion, but any predictions for this film now require a big qualifier that it has consistently performed ahead of expectations and keeps surprising with it resilience. It’s not merely Pixar’s biggest film ever, it’s the highest grossing animated movie of all time, and easily the biggest release of 2024 to date.
While Deadpool & Wolverine is having an undeniably phenomenal run and will be among the year’s biggest and most acclaimed releases, I don’t see any path for it to challenge Inside Out 2’s enormous mountain of cash at this point. The Deadpool sequel is track to finish somewhere around $1.25 billion, or maybe several million north of that, but obviously not approaching the $1.6 billion bar.
It looks inevitable that Deadpool & Wolverine will top the $1.2 billion threshold and pass Iron Man 3’s $1.21 billion to become the seventh-highest grossing Marvel Studios release of all time. That’s where it will finish out its run, since Black Panther’s $1.33 billion is too high for Deadpool & Wolverine to top without a huge re-release that significantly overperforms.
Which isn’t out of the realm of possibility, if Marvel creates another PG-13 alternate cut of the film, the way Deadpool 2 got a Thanksgiving holiday re-release in PG-13 form — and with new scenes for a The Princess Bride-inspired framing device that works magically and makes it my personal choice for the best film of the previous Deadpool movies.
The same sort of new PG-13 version of Deadpool & Wolverine with the right new additional framing device combined with the right release date could reignite interest in the film. Purely for example (and as a screenwriter trying to add perspective to help drive home the point): how about Deadpool pitching the story and events of Deadpool & Wolverine to Kermit and the rest of the Muppets (owned by Disney, remember) as a music-and-dance show they could put on to raise money to help save the Muppets’ venue (again)?
Could “Hugh Jackman” try out for the Muppet’s show? You better believe it. Would Wolverine and Sabertooth have a mutant brothers song-and-dance show in a Las Vegas casino? It would almost be a crime if they didn’t. Reshoot some of the most violent scenes with muppet versions of Deadpool, Wolverine, and the bad guys they’re disemboweling/beheading? It’s what will sell the most tickets. Include a subplot about Hugh Jackman secretly replacing Wolverine in the Broadway show with Sabertooth in a weird riff on The Prestige? Okay that’s probably one dive too deep, sorry.
I’m joking around, but only a bit — a creative kid-friendly (or maybe kid-friendlier) version of Deadpool & Wolverine released at Christmastime, and featuring the Muppets? That could be a joke-writing and a money-printing machine that could run through the holiday season into the New Year, and generate the nearly $400 million the film would need to capture the 2024 box office crown.
So if Deadpool & Wolverine has any desire to challenge for the top 2024 spot, it will have to attempt something like that to generate the sort of numbers it would need to top Inside Out 2. And of course, that assumes nothing else comes along later this year with even higher ticket sales than either Deadpool’s or Inside Out’s sequels.
Looking at the box office broadly, notice that besides Alien: Romulus, the box office top 10 heading into the weekend included Trap, Cuckoo, and Longlegs, and with A Quiet Place: Day One just missing the top 10. That’s a lot of horror movies in the top tiers of the charts this summer season. Animation isn’t really a genre, but as far as other trends go this year, animation has done it’s share of heavy lifting at the box office as well, obviously.
Among them all, the studio name that keeps coming up is Disney. And looking at the calendar for the rest of 2024, I don’t think that’s going to change much.
