The six-weekend projection for Disney‘s Mufasa: The Lion King has hit via Quorum tracking service and they’re see it at a $59M-$66M opening when the Barry Jenkins directed prequel hits cinemas on Dec. 20.
Keep in mind that the fire-breathing campaigns for Mufasa: The Lion King and Paramount’s Sonic: The Hedgehog 3 haven’t truly begun yet, heck, they’ll be dropping trailers left, right and center during the box office perfect storm that is Wicked, Gladiator II and Moana II. Also, keep in mind the prediction is for general audiences.
On the Quorum ‘Pay to See’ scale — meaning audiences polled who’ll actually shell out money to get off the couch–Mufasa roars with a 62, a number that’s up there with the Thanksgiving holy trinity of Wicked (64), Gladiator II (63) and Moana 2 (62).
Mufasa is more female, while Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which it’s opening against, is more male. Mufasa also looks to grab the over 35 audience while the latter is more young and male. The movie tells the origin story of Simba’s king-to-be father. Aaron Pierre, Donald Glover, Thandiwe Newton, Billy Eichner, Seth Rogen are just some of the voices.
While the weekend before Christmas has been hope to some of the biggest openings of all-time, read the second best ever domestic start of Spider-Man: No Way Home at $260M (Dec. 17, 2021); it’s all about the 5-6x multiple that can be generated from a movie bowing in this corridor. Christmas falls on a Wednesday this year and from that point on, moviegoing is in full tilt with some seeing as many as two-three movies through the first weekend of the New Year.
The photorealistic animated movie is a prequel to the 2019 version, The Lion King, directed by Jon Favreau, which opened to $191.7M, and went on to gross $543.6M domestic, $1.66 billion global.
Disney didn’t respond for request for comment on the Mufasa projections.
Note Quorum was the first tracking service to forecast that Disney/Marvel Studios’ Deadpool & Wolverine would exceed $200M in its opening weekend.
