A Movie's Second-Weekend Drop Is the Number Studios Read First. Here Is How It Is Calculated and What Counts as Normal.

Most people read an opening weekend backwards. The sentence goes like this: "It opened huge, so it's a hit." Maybe. Maybe the fans all came on Friday, told their friends to stay home, and the film fell off a cliff seven days later. Studios run the check in the other order, and the first number they reach for on the second Monday isn't the opening gross. It's the drop.

The short version, before any machinery: a film's second-weekend drop is the share of its opening-weekend gross that vanishes in weekend two. Take weekend two away from weekend one, then divide the missing money by the opening. On Box Office Mojo's chart of wide releases, the broad middle runs from about 40% to about 60%. Below 40%, a film's holding, and word of mouth's doing paid work. Past 60%, it's leaking. Past 80%, the audience came, saw and left for good.

A film's drop is one subtraction and one division, and nothing else

Run the machine small first, with round numbers, the way you'd work it at a kitchen table. Say a film takes in $100 across its first Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The next weekend it takes in $60. The money that vanished is $40 — that's $100 minus $60. Now divide the vanished money by the money you started with: $40 divided by $100 is 0.4, and 0.4 said as a percentage is 40%. The drop is 40%.

Notice what the other way of saying it gives you. The film kept 60 cents of every opening dollar, because $60 out of $100 stayed. Kept and dropped always add up to the whole opening: 60% kept plus 40% dropped is 100%. When a headline says a film "fell 55%," it's telling you the kept share too: 45 cents on the dollar came back.

One more habit to build before the real figures land. A percentage without its denominator is a story half told. A 50% drop from a $150 million opening leaves $75 million — a bigger second weekend than most films ever have. A 50% drop from a $2 million opening leaves $1 million and a much shorter run. Same percentage, different movies. The drop measures shape, not size.

Inside Out 2 opened at $154,201,673 and came back with $101,210,550 in weekend two

Now the real thing, with every figure from Box Office Mojo's own tables. Inside Out 2 opened on Friday, June 14, 2024, in 4,440 theaters. Mojo's daily table gives the three days one at a time: Friday $63,558,115, Saturday $51,175,086, Sunday $39,468,472. Add them and you get the opening weekend: $154,201,673 — the same figure Mojo carries on its all-time opening-weekends chart.

Weekend two, same theater count, 4,440. Friday, June 21: $30,593,873. Saturday, June 22: $38,819,111. Sunday, June 23: $31,797,566. Add those and the second weekend is $101,210,550.

Now the drop, step by step. Subtract: $154,201,673 minus $101,210,550 is $52,991,123 gone. Divide the gone money by the opening: $52,991,123 divided by $154,201,673 is 0.344 — a drop of 34.4%. Said the frequency way: out of every 100 opening dollars, about 66 came back the next weekend and about 34 stayed home. For a film that opened above $150 million, that's an unusually gentle landing, and you can check the arithmetic against Mojo's daily rows yourself. That's rather the point of showing it.

Studios read the drop first because weekend two is the audience's first honest answer

An opening weekend is partly a measure of marketing and anticipation — everyone who waited months for the film shows up in the same three days. Weekend two is the first reading taken after ordinary people have heard from the people who went. A small drop says the recommendation travelled. A big drop says it didn't, or that everyone who wanted the film already had it. Fan-heavy openings burn bright and thin fast.

You can watch the drop's prediction sitting inside Mojo's totals column. Inside Out 2, down 34.4%, finished at $652,980,194 domestically — about 4.2 times its opening weekend. Barbie, down 42.6% (it opened at $162,022,044 and made $93,011,602 in weekend two), finished at $636,238,421 — about 3.9 times its opening. Joker: Folie à Deux, down 81.4% (opened at $37,678,467, made $7,002,654 in weekend two), finished at $58,300,287 — about 1.5 times its opening. The gentler the second weekend, the longer the run tends to stretch. That's the whole reason the drop gets read first: it's the earliest honest signal of how much movie is left after opening weekend ends.

A normal drop on Mojo's chart runs from about 40% to about 60%

Mojo keeps a chart built for exactly this question: every wide release ranked by its second-weekend drop, worst first. Read down it and the shape of "normal" stops being a guess. The top is a cliff — the steepest entry fell 94.9%, and the first fifty entries all fell 80% or more. Keep reading. Around rank 800, the drops sit near 60%. Around rank 1,600, they sit near 54%. Around rank 3,000, they sit near 43%, and the chart runs on for thousands more entries, down into the 20s.

So the honest answer to "what's a normal drop" is a band, not a line: about 40% to about 60% covers the broad middle of wide releases on Mojo's chart. Under 40% and a film's holding. Over 60% and it's leaking, fast. Over 80% and you're reading the top of the chart, where the famous collapses live.

Named examples pin the band down. Barbie's 42.6% sits at the gentle end of it, with a kept share of about 57 cents on the dollar. Superman opened at $125,021,735 and made $58,450,094 in weekend two — down 53.2%, squarely mid-band. Even the biggest opening on Mojo's chart, Spider-Man: Brand New Day at $360,091,572, fell 59.9% to $144,254,386 in weekend two. A giant opening buys a giant second weekend; it doesn't buy immunity from the percentage.

Three things bend a drop before it means anything: theaters, the calendar and event titles

Here's the trick — if a number can't survive the kitchen table, it doesn't run — and this one has edges worth naming before you quote it at anyone.

First, theaters. The drop assumes roughly the same number of screens both weekends; a film that loses a thousand theaters will post a scary drop that's partly arithmetic, not rejection. Mojo prints the second-weekend theater count beside every drop on its chart — use it. Inside Out 2 held all 4,440 of its theaters, and that's part of why its 34.4% reads clean.

Second, the calendar. A second weekend landing on a holiday, or against a giant new opening, bends the number in ways the film can't control. Third, the top of Mojo's chart is clogged with re-releases and one-weekend event titles, built to burn in a single weekend; their 85% and 90% drops are a business model, not a verdict. Compare a film against films like it — wide, new, playing the same weekends — or the comparison's rigged before it starts.

Take this test to the next chart you meet. Ask three questions: What's the opening, in dollars, not adjectives? What share came back, and how many theaters were still showing the film? And what did films like it do? Answer those and the drop stops being a scary red percentage in a headline. It becomes what the studios use it as: the first true sentence a film says about itself, one weekend after the noise. Pair it with this desk's explainer on what an opening-weekend gross actually means, and you've got the whole first chapter of a film's life — the ad, and then the review.