The 2022 box office has its first big projection miss of the season as Disney/Pixar’s “Lightyear,” which had been expected to earn the best family movie opening of the year, is now estimated for a soft $52 million opening and could lose the No. 1 spot this weekend to Universal’s “Jurassic World: Dominion.”
Pre-release projections for the “Toy Story” spinoff were expected to be at least $75 million with many analysts expecting a start in the $80 million range. That would have put “Lightyear” in the neighborhood of past Pixar films “Monsters University” and “Inside Out” and would have beaten the $72 million opening of spring family title “Sonic the Hedgehog 2.” Instead, it is opening around the $53 million start posted by “Cars 3” in 2017.
While “Lightyear” was the top grosser on Friday with $20.3 million from 4,255 screens — including $5.2 million from Thursday previews — industry estimates now have “Jurassic World: Dominion” beating “Lightyear” with a second weekend total of $57 million, a result that would give the dinosaur blockbuster a 10-day domestic total of just under $250 million.
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In a way, this is history repeating itself. Back in 2015, the first “Jurassic World” earned $103 million in its second weekend to deny “Inside Out” the No. 1 spot despite the Pixar film’s $90 million opening. The relatively lower numbers posted by “Dominion” created the expectation that “Lightyear” could beat a weaker second weekend from the dino film, but that is proving to not be the case.
There’s still a chance for “Lightyear” to improve its numbers and retake No. 1 if it overperforms at Saturday and Sunday matinee screenings, which are usually the bread and butter for summer animated films and are difficult to estimate in projections as they bring in walk-up traffic. Audience word-of-mouth has also been positive as “Lightyear” scored an A- on CinemaScore and Rotten Tomatoes scores of 78% critics and 88% audience.
But such soft numbers may be a sign that Disney’s release strategies around its animated films have impacted its theatrical power. “Lightyear” is the first Pixar film to get a 45-day theatrical window after “Soul,” “Luca” and “Turning Red” were all released exclusively on Disney+. Or it could simply be that audiences were not especially interested in seeing a Buzz Lightyear spinoff film in theaters to begin with.
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While it will take some time to parse out these results, what is much clearer is that “Lightyear” is losing moviegoer interest to the two live-action blockbusters that have dominated theaters over the past two weeks. Not only is “Jurassic World: Dominion” still doing well, Paramount/Skydance’s “Top Gun: Maverick” has a spectacular $40 million total in its fourth weekend in theaters, a weekend drop of just 23%.
With this result, “Top Gun: Maverick” is a virtual lock to become Tom Cruise’s first $1 billion box office hit and Paramount’s first film to hit that mark since “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” in 2011. Through four weekends, “Maverick” has a domestic total of $462 million, having passed $800 million worldwide on Thursday.