Sonic Movie to Make $70 Million in Domestic Box Office Sales

The entertainment industry website Deadline has updated their estimated box office ticket sales for the Sonic movie, and now believes the film will close out the 4-day long weekend with a domestic total of at least $70 million. That number is being shared and quoted across multiple industry websites, including BoxOfficeReport.com.

Deadline believes the website made $16.5 million on Sunday, to go with the $21 million tally on the combined Thursday and Friday sales, and $20.5 million in Saturday sales. Deadline reports that Paramount is internally estimating $12 million in sales today, a Holiday in the United States.

To this point, Sonic has overdelivered on industry estimates. It is reasonable to believe the film could continue on that trend and keep climbing. The highest domestic 4-day opening so far in 2020 is the debut of Bad Boys for Life at $73 million. It is not impossible for Sonic to tie or beat that number.

Combined with overseas box office estimates of $43 million, the Sonic Movie will have a worldwide opening weekend debut of at least $113 million. That will not beat the global opening weekend for Detective Pikachu, which had the benefit of a simultaneous launch in China. But Sonic will hold the record of the best domestic box office debut for a video game adaptation of all time.

It’s hard to tell from these numbers alone whether the Sonic movie has broken even or made a profit. Consider that we don’t have a dollar amount that Paramount spent on marketing the film. That included elaborate setups in New York and Los Angeles, fan parties in LA, London, and Berlin, digital and social media marketing, and more. That budget easily could have been in the tens of millions of dollars. Some believe the film may need to rack up ticket sales close to $300 million for the entire project to be considered profitable–and assure a sequel is worth the investment. There’s a long way to go to hit that mark.

But between a lot of school kids in the US being off this week, little competition for the film until March, and major markets like Japan and China yet to open the film, it should not be a question of if, but when the film can make back its total budget. All eyes will be on the Sonic panel at SXSW next month to see if Sega will give the green light.