Sonic Homing In On Top Box Office Spot With $21 Mil Friday Haul, $64.3 Mil Projected

We now have our first concrete numbers for Sonic the Hedgehog’s U.S. box office performance, and they’re looking good: it hauled in $21 million it’s opening day (which includes the $3 million from Thursday night previews). To put that in perspective, this makes it the largest opening day of all time for a video game movie, allowing it to barely squeak past Detective Pikachu’s $20.7 million.

These numbers have also increased the movie’s box office projection. The latest box office estimates from Deadline now project the movie making $64.3 million through President’s Day, including $53.99 million over the three-day weekend. The latter number puts Sonic the Hedgehog tantalizingly close to being the largest U.S. opening for a video game movie ever, with the current record holder, Detective Pikachu, being only slightly higher then that at $54.3 million.

These estimates are also significantly up from what was projected yesterday, when the Sonic movie was projected to make $45 million and $55 million over the three-day and President’s Day weekend, respectively. Paramount itself has released somewhat lower projections, with a $60 million four-day and $50 million three-day haul expected, which would still make it the second biggest video game movie opening.

Sonic’s ticket sales are being heavily driven by families, which make up 44 percent of ticket sales, with general audiences being the remaining 56 percent.

Sonic’s first international numbers should be released either later today or tomorrow. When those numbers come, we’ll be updating this article, so stay tuned!

via Deadline