Get ready for more action and excitement! The fan event for Paramount/Skydance/Hasbro’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts brought in an impressive $8.8M in previews from over 3100 locations. Even without the Wednesday fan grosses, the movie still managed to rake in $7.6M, which is comparable to the previews for Fast X that went on to earn $28M on its first Friday and $67M on its opening weekend. The big question now is whether Rise of the Beasts or Sony Animation’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse in its second weekend will take the top spot, with both movies aiming for $50M+. Speaking of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, it holds the record for the longest running time for an animated movie among Hollywood movies, not including Japanese anime, at 140 minutes per Comscore, beating out Incredibles 2 at 118 minutes.
But let’s not forget about the previous Transformers movie, Transformers: The Last Knight, which opened on a Wednesday back in 2017 and earned $5.5M before making $15.6M on its first day and $44.6M over 3-days, $68.4M over five. Rise of the Beasts preview numbers also tower over those of the Transformers spinoff movie, Bumblebee, which had a pre-Christmas weekend release back in 2018 and earned $2.85M including both Thursday night and fan sneaks. Bumblebee opened to a 3-day of $21.6M.
Co-financed by Skydance, Rise of the Beasts cost a net $195M, but the real grab here is overseas, with projections at $100M, half of which is expected to come from China where they love robots-in-disguise. And let’s not forget about the summer box office, which cleared $1 billion from May 1-June 4 thanks to Spider-Verse, putting it 8% ahead of 2022 at the same point in time ($925.1M), but 19% behind the summer of Avengers: Endgame in 2019, which stood at $1.24 billion at that point in time.
So get ready to refresh for more analysis and stay tuned to see if Rise of the Beasts or Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse will come out on top!
