Weekend predictions: Primate and Greenland not likely to topple Avatar

January 9, 2026

A still from the movie Primate

The first “non-Holiday” weekend of 2026 sees two new releases with aspirations of a win at the box office. However, Primate and Greenland 2: Migration both look as though they will fall quite a bit short of Avatar’s earnings on its fourth weekend, with Primate likely to take the consolation prize of having 2026’s best opening so far, even if it doesn’t have a lock on second place on the overall chart at this point.

Here’s our model’s baseline prediction for Primate going into the weekend:

The big warning sign that we got yesterday for this film was a theater count under 3,000 locations. That suggests that theater owners don’t have a lot of confidence in this film, and pulled our model’s prediction well below $10 million.

Its preview numbers look more promising, and put a $10-million debut firmly back in play…

Greenland 2: Migration is also lacking in theaters, with just 2,710 to its name. That pulls our baseline prediction down quite a bit, with the model getting bearish on a $10-million opening.

The preview number is similarly quite poor…

The saving grace for Greenland may be that it will skew towards a slightly older audience. That could give it a slightly better result than our model is predicting right now. The straight-to-streaming-during-the-pandemic release of the first Greenland film has probably hurt it, with the audience that saw the first film possibly waiting for it to arrive on the home market again.

Last and, well, actually, least, Is This Thing On? expands wide this weekend. Here’s how the model feels about that…

The model pegs this as a $1.7 million weekend, similar to the likes of After the Hunt when it expanded back in October. That probably wouldn’t put it in the top 10.

Here’s what the model thinks the top 10 will look like.

The good news is that we should have a better weekend overall that this time last year, when Den of Thieves 2: Pantera opened with $15 million. It doesn’t look as though Gerard Butler will pull off another box office win this weekend, but that’s largely because the market is in better shape than it was last year.

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Bruce Nash,