Roll of the Dice: ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Could Soar or Sink at the Post-Pandemic Box Office

Based on its $71.5 million global opening weekend, Paramount/eOne’s “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” may face two opposing paths — one to success, the other to failure.

In one universe, “Dungeons & Dragons” turns its rather modest theatrical launch — $37.2 million opening in North America — into a month-long run of robust ticket sales thanks to its excellent word of mouth. In the other, those strong reviews fail to draw enough ticket sales for “Dungeons & Dragons” to turn a theatrical profit against its $150 million budget before marketing, and Paramount is left to turn to digital on-demand and other post-theatrical streams to make back its investment.

“We’ve seen movies find a wider audience thanks to very strong reviews over the past year and we’ve seen multiple films coexist alongside each other,” said Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock. “But ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ is going to have to leg out with excellent reviews against a cultural behemoth like ‘Super Mario Bros.,’ which needs just ‘good enough’ reviews to become one of the highest grossing movies of the year.”

It’s difficult to say which path “D&D” will take at this point. It’s much closer to the one big bust of the March box office, “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” in terms of its budget and domestic opening than to the month’s biggest hits, “Creed III” and “John Wick: Chapter 4,” even though its reception scores are just as strong as those latter two films.

Let’s map out how each scenario could play out:

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The worst-case scenario

In the darkest timeline, “Dungeons & Dragons” takes a sharp second-weekend drop of more than 60% and never recovers its box office momentum. Several factors may contribute to such a skid, but one possible one may be that Universal/Illumination’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” turns out to be much more direct competition than Paramount and analysts are currently expecting.

An animated family movie with humor that skews more towards the elementary-school crowd shouldn’t have that much overlap with a four-quadrant PG-13 fantasy adventure, but perhaps the crowd that likes playing “Dungeons & Dragons” or just enjoys fantasy also loves playing Mario games. Maybe the cultural pull of the studio behind “Minions” bringing the most famous video-game character of all time to the big screen sucks up all the conversation surrounding the movies, leaving “Dungeons & Dragons” struggling to grab general audience attention.

This scenario would also see “D&D,” in spite of its strong reviews, falling to the post-COVID trend of No. 1 films having steeper second weekend drops than their pre-pandemic counterparts. While there have been some exceptions like “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” showing incredible legs and weekend drops of under 50%, “John Wick: Chapter 4” fell 62% this past weekend from its $73.5 million opening weekend despite being the best-reviewed film in that series.

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Lionsgate insiders said such a drop was expected from their internal projections, and the film’s $28.2 million second weekend total was still higher than the $24.5 million second weekend of “John Wick: Chapter 3” in 2019. But Lionsgate’s projections were based on similar drops for other tentpoles like “Black Adam” (59%) and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” (67%).

“John Wick 4” had better reception than those films, but as The Numbers founder Bruce Nash told TheWrap last month, the drops have been steeper across the board as the average second weekend drop for wide-release films in 2021 and 2022 stood at 57% compared to 51% in 2018 and 2019.

For a profitable theatrical run, “D&D” will need to beat that average on successive weekends. If it doesn’t, it may just be that despite the praise of this film as accessible no matter what one’s familiarity with the Forgotten Realms is, “Dungeons & Dragons” couldn’t drum up the interest among general audiences to drive out and buy a ticket for a movie from a franchise they don’t regularly engage with.

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The best-case scenario

In the brightest timeline, “D&D” is able to avoid having Nintendo eat away at its potential audience despite the shared interest from moviegoers who like both tabletop and video games. While Easter weekend may bring “Mario” a four-quadrant opening, that doesn’t exclude the possibility of teens and young adults circling back around to seeing “Dungeons & Dragons” later this month once the video game adaptation’s grip on the pop culture conversation loosens a bit.

On opening weekend, “Dungeons & Dragons” took 59% of its audience from the 18-34 demographic, skewing more towards non-family audiences that could still flow towards “Dungeons & Dragons” in steady numbers. Even if “Super Mario Bros.” peels away general-audience interest this coming weekend from “D&D,” that may not be a critical hit if “D&D” can still draw enough Millennial and Gen X moviegoers to keep the word-of-mouth momentum going.

Should that happen, “Dungeons & Dragons” won’t have to worry about any major blockbuster competition until “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” on the first weekend of May. There are still some smaller films that could have low-to-mid-budget hit potential like Universal’s “Renfield” and Warner Bros.’ “Evil Dead Rise.” But these are films that aim towards a narrower audience subset than “Dungeons & Dragons,” which could still draw in audiences who come back around to it in the latter half of April after Mariomania quiets down a bit.

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With “Puss In Boots: The Last Wish,” we’ve seen how a film, if given enough time, can leg out considerably as cultural buzz around the film endures and reaches new people who didn’t have the film on their radar on opening weekend. “Puss in Boots 2” looked like it might get smothered by the incredible hype for “Avatar: The Way of Water” and the winter storms that stifled Christmas moviegoing, but its quality won out and it glided to a $184 million domestic/$478 million worldwide theatrical run while staying in the top 5 charts until the end of February.

“Dungeons & Dragons” won’t have the advantage of heavy family turnout that “Puss” enjoyed, but it has that same opening weekend excitement from early moviegoers. Now the test begins to see whether that will be enough to elevate a big-budget film to box office success after an opening weekend that would have been a death sentence for a poorer received film.

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