According to Deadline, the projections for Disney’s Eternals is heading toward a $30M Friday, including the $9.5M previews from last night. The latest updates put Chloe Zhao’s movie in the $70-75M range for the end of the weekend. Compared to Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings‘ $71.4M and Black Widow‘s $80.3M opening weekend numbers, Eternals may fall in between both films or just below.
Audience scores were low last night, but the fans keep coming out for this MCU Phase 4 title, an integral part of their multi-universe storyline laid out in Shang-Chi and Disney+’s Loki and WandaVision. There’s more to come this holiday season, though. Sony/Marvel/Disney’s Spider-Man: No Way Home will feature cameos of Doctor Strange and others from the older Sam Raimi Spider-Man universe, and it’s expected to fill movie theaters come December.
For Eternals as a deeper-universe piece of Marvel, this is a long movie. Avengers: Endgame ran for 3 hours and 1 minute, but Eternals caps it at 2 hours and 37 minutes. It’s longer than Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and Guardians of the Galaxy, including previous November MCU titles (Thor Ragnarok, Doctor Strange, and Thor: The Dark World). As Deadline indicates, longer running times equal fewer rotations in auditoriums. During an ongoing pandemic, a short movie length is a key to box office success.
Catch Eternals in theaters now!