By the Numbers: Verity Fell 64%, Resident Evil Fell 62% — What the Audience Grade Actually Predicts

17 days ago by Jordan Blake 5 min read

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A C+ movie and a B+ movie lost almost exactly the same share of their audience in weekend two. I lined up this fall's five wide releases, CinemaScore against second-weekend hold, to see what the grade really tells you. It tells you something, just less than the trade-press shorthand suggests.

The standard box-office reflex goes like this: good CinemaScore, good legs; bad CinemaScore, front-loaded crash. When Verity dropped 64% this past weekend on a C+, everyone nodded. Of course it did.

Then I pulled up Resident Evil's second weekend, the one you actually have to compare it with. B+ grade, 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, franchise-best opening. It fell 61.7%.

The headline number floating around for Resident Evil this week, a 34% drop, is real, but it's the film's fourth weekend. Compare weekend two with weekend two and the gap between a C+ and a B+ shrinks to 2.5 points. So let me show you what the numbers reveal when you line the weeks up properly.

The sample

Five wide releases from Sept 18 to Oct 4, all opening in 3,300+ theaters except Primetime (2,874). Grosses are domestic, from Box Office Mojo, cross-checked against The Numbers (they agree to the dollar). Oct 9-11 figures are Sunday estimates, so actuals can shift by a few hundred thousand. CinemaScores were each confirmed by two outlets.

Heart of the Beast (Paramount, opened Sept 25-27)

• CinemaScore: A-
• Opening: $20,042,473
• Weekend 2: $10,876,713 (-45.7%)
• Weekend 3: $7.1M (-34.7%)
• Running total: $49.7M, 2.48x its opening after three weekends

Primetime (A24, opened Sept 25-27)

• CinemaScore: B
• Opening: $18,830,798
• Weekend 2: $7,748,406 (-58.9%)
• Weekend 3: $4,014,003 (-48.2%)
• Running total: $41.5M, 2.20x after three weekends

Resident Evil (Sony, opened Sept 18-20)

• CinemaScore: B+
• Opening: $60,152,878
• Weekend 2: $23,012,848 (-61.7%)
• Weekend 3: $12,618,839 (-45.2%)
• Weekend 4: $8.35M (-33.8%)
• Running total: $138.5M domestic, 2.30x after four weekends

Digger (Warner Bros., opened Oct 2-4)

• CinemaScore: C+
• Opening: $8,001,856
• Weekend 2: $3.2M (-60.0%)
• Running total: $14.4M, 1.80x after two weekends

Verity (Amazon MGM, opened Oct 2-4)

• CinemaScore: C+
• Opening: $32,031,011
• Weekend 2: $11.48M (-64.2%)
• Running total: $53.9M, 1.68x after two weekends

The mini-chart: grade vs. weekend-two drop

Each block is roughly 5 points of drop. Shorter is better.

• A- Heart of the Beast: █████████ 45.7%
• B Primetime: ████████████ 58.9%
• C+ Digger: ████████████ 60.0%
• B+ Resident Evil: ████████████ 61.7%
• C+ Verity: █████████████ 64.2%

What the grade gets right

The top of the grade scale does real work. Heart of the Beast, the only A-range grade in the group, held best by a wide margin: 13 points better than the next film in weekend two, and still the best in weekend three (-34.7%). It's also the film with the best multiplier so far, nearly 2.5x its opening.

The third weekend tells the same story. Heart of the Beast (A-) fell 34.7%, Resident Evil (B+) 45.2%, Primetime (B) 48.2%. That's three films, three grades, in perfect rank order. Once the opening-weekend crowd is gone and word of mouth is the only fuel left, the grade starts to sort the films.

What the grade gets wrong

Below the A range, weekend two barely separates. Four films with grades from B+ down to C+ landed between -58.9% and -64.2%, a band of 5.3 points. The B+ film fell harder than the B film and harder than one of the C+ films. Rank them by drop and the B+ sits between the two C+ films.

The other forces are easy to see in the data:

• Opening size and fan-loading: Resident Evil opened at $60.2M, nearly double the next-biggest (Verity's $32.0M), on an audience that was 66% male and 75% under 35 according to PostTrak. Verity is a Colleen Hoover adaptation with a built-in readership; fans of the book made up the early audience, and TheWrap flagged it as a likely front-loaded title during opening weekend. A pent-up fanbase spends its money in weekend one whatever the grade says, so the second weekend falls from a higher shelf.
• The weekday tell: Look at what each film earned between its first and second weekends, as a share of its opening. Digger 40%, Primetime 39%, Heart of the Beast 37%, Resident Evil 33%, Verity 32%. The two most fan-loaded openings had the thinnest weekdays. That's a sign of front-loading, not of quality.
• Who opened next to you: Resident Evil's second weekend ran into Heart of the Beast, Primetime and Forgotten Island all at once, plus the $26.1M Avengers: Endgame re-release. Verity's second weekend ran into Other Mommy's $27.5M horror opening. Competition doesn't show up in a letter grade.
• Theater counts: Not the explanation here. Resident Evil kept all 3,684 theaters in weekend two, and Verity actually added 62. Neither drop came from losing screens.

The verdict

Across these five films, the CinemaScore predicts the outliers better than the middle. An A-range grade bought Heart of the Beast a clearly better hold. B+ to C+ was a wash in weekend two, where opening size and audience make-up explained more of the drop than the letter did. By weekend three, the grades lined up in order again.

That's a pattern in five films, not a law. The sample is small, the Oct 9-11 figures are still Sunday estimates, and competition is a confounder no spreadsheet can control for. Still, it's a better rule of thumb than "B+ means legs": a grade tells you about the third weekend more than the second, and fan-driven openings fall hard in weekend two regardless.

The next data point arrives on Oct 16-18, when Other Mommy, sitting on a D+, plays its second weekend. I'm not going to guess the number. I'll just add it to the list.