EXCLUSIVE: Sony/Crunchyroll’s Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle, as we knew all along, is having a great night with preview estimates at $10M at 2,800 sites, maybe a little more by sunrise. Showtimes, boosted by Imax and PLFs, began at 4PM.
That amount of cash is about equal to the pic’s first five days of advance ticket sales, which by the way, repped a record for an anime movie.
That Thursday night figure is almost as much as Five Nights at Freddy’s previews ($10.3M), it’s $500K less than Oppenheimer‘s ($10.5M) and higher than last fall’s Joker: Folie a Deus ($7M). Not that those are any hard comps; it’s just interesting to juxtapose the amount of cash this anime pic is racking up. Why are fans rushing to see this movie? Because it’s the first in a trilogy. The record opening for anime movie belongs to Warner Bros 1999 Pokemon movie which debuted to $31M.
As we mentioned, Infinity Castle‘s weekend will be very frontloaded. Sony has forecasted $35M for the opening of the Haruo Sotozaki directed movie, while other sources believe the anime title’s opening lies between $45M-$60M over Friday-Sunday. Critics on Rotten Tomatoes are 96% fresh from 27 reviews, while the audience score stands at 99%.
As we told you in the preview, it’s going to be a deep bench of a weekend with New Line’s Conjuring: Last Rites banking potentially another $29M in its second frame, and newcomers Focus Features’ Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale and Lionsgate’s The Long Walk respectively doing $15M-$20M and $10M. Last Rites crossed $100M on Wednesday and is bound to be the highest grossing Conjuring movie ever at the domestic B.O., surpassing the original’s $137.4M total.
Also opening is Bleecker Street’s Spinal Tap II: The End Continues with an expected $3M-$5M; critics currently 74% fresh on the Rob Reiner-Christopher Guest-Michael McKean-Harry Shearer sequel.
Long Walk, based on the Stephen King tome about a group of teenage boys who compete in an annual contest where they must maintain a certain walking speed or get shot, is bound for a $1.2M to $1.5M Thursday. The Francis Lawrence directed movie at 94% fresh with critics.
Downton Abbey 3 we’re hearing is north of $1M for the night which is about what the previous installment, Downton Abbey: The New Era did which turned into a $7.3M Friday and $16M opening. The original movie during pre-Covid September 2019 minted a $2.1M Thursday night on its way to a $13.8M Friday and $31M opening. The threequel currently has the best reviews in the trilogy with 88% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and a near high best audience score of 96% just behind New Era’s 97%.
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