Indiana Jones 5 vs. Solo: the Opening Weekend Box Office Gross--and Beyond

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is presently said to be headed for a $60 million gross--at the bottom end of even the latest, much-lowered range projected by Boxoffice Pro.

At this point further comparisons with prior Indiana Jones films seem pointless. Let us compare the performance with the opening of the film that has been on my mind since I started thinking about Indiana Jones' box office prospects back in April, Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Solo took in $84 million back in 2018--which adjusted for inflation is equal to over $100 million in current prices. The result is that we are, so far, looking not at a Solo-like collapse, but something possibly worse here. Should Indiana Jones 5, like Solo, make about 2.5 times its opening gross domestically it will not much overtop $150 million, never mind the $211 million that Boxoffice Pro predicts as the low end of the range of the film's likely gross (and about the $214 million Solo made in current dollars, never mind the $260 million or so it made in inflation-adjusted, 2023 dollars).

Could Indiana Jones do better than that? There may seem some hope in the Rotten Tomatoes ratings--where the critics' ratings have edged upwards (to 68 percent), and the audience's ratings are more generous still (the "Verified" audience affording an 89 percent score, the "All Audience" score 81 percent), suggesting that many will have a more favorable view of the film than the crowd that got the first look at it at Cannes. The film may also benefit from surprisingly weak competition--the market packed this year not with hits but with flops, such that The Flash will not be much of a rival, while in what is an all too familiar pattern this year Boxoffice Pro is already downgrading its expectations for the next possible rival, Mission: Impossible 7. Still, it is not the launch that might have been hoped for, with very good legs required to get it merely to the $200 million mark, and even Top Gun 2-like endurance not quite getting it to $400 million--all as, again, I see little reason to expect a big boost from overseas. The result is that I think $200 million about as well as it is likely to do domestically, and given the 60/40 international/domestic split on prior Indiana Jones films, $300 million the best that can be reasonably hoped for there, working out to a half billion dollars as the likely ceiling for this one--as it happens, about what Solo did globally in 2023 dollars.