Box Office Update: Elemental & Spider-Man duke it out for 1st while Flash falls hard

Working as a break between blockbusters, this weekend featured no huge tent pole releases. That is good news and bad news for the movies that were released last weekend as it looks like Pixar’s Elemental and Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse are battling it out for first place this weekend with an expected $18 million each. For Elemental that is welcome news after last weeks opening which saw the film become the second lowest opening ever for a Pixar movie (only 1995’s first ever Pixar film Toy Story came in lower, but tickets cost an average of $4.35 back then as opposed to $11.75 today.) If Elemental can hold on at its current pace, that will represent a sub 40% drop off which is really good in today’s opening weekend dominated market.

The bad news comes by way of The Flash as that film looks to take a substantial tumble in its second weekend which could lose as much as 75% of its audience with a $14 million weekend. I saw in the comments on our predictions post from Thursday that people think we are piling on The Flash by calling it a disaster. I should point out that not only did we give the film a glowing review (check out Chris Bumbray’s 8/10 review here) but these posts are simply about the box office receipts, and in that regard The Flash is an unmitigated disaster for Warner Bros. 

When their main star started making headlines for off the screen behavior, many people thought they should shelve the movie. They stuck to their guns, saying it was one of the best super hero movies ever made. No doubt Warner Brothers expected a huge financial success with The Flash but with an opening roughly $20 million less than even the most modest of predictions and a second weekend drop off over 70%, Warner’s may be regretting writing off Batgirl and not this movie.

With that big a tumble, it is possible that the Jennifer Lawrence fronted No Hard Feelings can finish atop The Flash in third place after posting a solid $2.15 million in Thursday previews on its way to an over $5 million Friday and a predicted 3-day total between $14 and $15 million. If this one can follow the directors previous R-rated endeavor: 2019’s Good Boys, No Hard Feelings can potentially do solid business in the long run.

Rounding out the top five will be Transformers: Rise of the Beasts with an estimated $10.6 million, representing a sub 50% drop from last week. When all is said and done, this seventh installment of the Transformers franchise will have surpassed the grosses of the last two Transformer movies (Bumblebee and The Last Knight) which is good news as this movie was meant to be a soft reboot of the franchise and should help restore the franchise to the highs it once had with subsequent films.

Outside the top five but still an impressive opening, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is looking at a second weekend expansion in the $7-8 million range in just 1,675 theaters. That number comes after the film posted the best per theater average of any film in the post pandemic world when it opened on just six screens last week with a $140,000 per screen average.

What do you make of The Flash dropping so much in its second weekend? Let us know in the comments section and don’t forget to check back tomorrow when we have a full run down of this weeks box office numbers.