The Quorum

Final Numbers: SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS

Industry analysts are expecting a four-day holiday opening for SHANG-CHI in the neighborhood of $50M. Do The Quorum numbers support these projections?

First things first, as you know, SHANG-CHI is opening on Labor Day weekend. The record for a Labor Day debut belongs to HALLOWEEN (2017) with $31M. It would be a major disappointment if SHANG-CHI didn’t break that record. But can it get to $50M? Let’s take a look.

In terms of comps, we are NOT going to use BLACK WIDOW or THE SUICIDE SQUAD. While we would like to use Marvel or DC films, these two were hybrid releases, and SHANG-CHI is opening exclusively in theaters. Instead, we’re going to use F9 and A QUIET PLACE PART II as our comps. They had the highest performing non-hybrid openings of the year.

F9 opened to $70M, and QUIET debuted at $48M.

It’s important to note that neither of these films opened on a holiday weekend. They reflect just Friday-Sunday numbers. SHANG-CHI has the added benefit of Monday being a holiday. For the sake of an apples-to-apples comparison, if the expectation is for SHANG-CHI to hit $50M across the long weekend, we would need it to make about $42M for the Friday-Sunday period.

So really, the question is can the film get to $42M?

As the chart below shows, SHANG-CHI (brown) is opening with an awareness of 43%. That’s in line with QUIET (light yellow), which opened with 44% awareness, but well below the 60% for F9 (dark yellow).

On this metric alone, it looks like SHANG-CHI could open in the ballpark of the $48M made by QUIET.

On the interest side, SHANG-CHI has a very solid 5.6. As you can see, it ranks #12 among all upcoming releases being tracked by The Quorum. It is well above the average of 5.1 for all films.

But is that score large enough?

When we look at the comps, both F9 and A QUIET PLACE had incredible interest scores of 6.1. It is extremely rare to have a score above 6.0 at opening. But it does make you wonder if the SHANG-CHI number is too low at 5.5.

While that’s a terrific score, it does suggest that there is a sizable core that is excited about the film, but there is some hesitancy beyond the core. Those fans will show up on week one, but it may take word-of-mouth to grow the audience beyond that core. If fans like it as much as critics, word-of-mouth could bring more filmgoers into the fold.

For that reason, The Quorum data suggests that SHANG-CHI may come near or just shy of the numbers for QUIET unless word-of-mouth spreads throughout the weekend.

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