This will be a very slow weekend in movie theaters, but it will still be an interesting one for box office followers, with three movies essentially tied for top spot in our Friday-morning predictions. Solo Mio did well on Thursday evening, and could have relatively decent legs through the weekend, while Iron Lung and Send Help have been trading places all week, and will likely perform very similarly in their second weekends. The eventual winner this weekend will likely be the film that is least affected by the Super Bowl on Sunday.

A multitude of newcomers hit theaters over the weekend, all aiming for the top spot at the box office. The real showdown, however, came down to Sam Raimi’s thriller Send Help and Markiplier’s horror feature Iron Lung. It turned into one of the closer races in recent memory, with Send Help narrowly claiming the win by less than $1 million over the three-day frame. Elsewhere, Melania debuted to $7.16 million while Shelter rounded out the newcomers with $5.53 million.

Thank you to everyone who has been reaching out to us regarding our reporting on the great opening weekend for Iron Lung. We want to give an update about what we reported, and acknowledge an error on our end. Over the weekend, we didn’t receive official estimates for Iron Lung from Markiplier. The numbers we posted were industry estimates, based on trusted sources, including reporting in Deadline and Variety. We posted a weekend estimate at 8.34am. We didn’t have daily estimates until around 12.30pm on Sunday, and posted them as soon as we had them. Unfortunately, we ranked all movies in the Saturday and Sunday daily charts, even though we hadn’t got estimates for Iron Lung. That may have created a false impression that we had stopped reporting on the film. We regret the error. We’re working to get actual numbers from Markiplier, and have reached out to his team. If we receive numbers from them, we will mark them as actuals on the chart. If we don’t, we will continue to mark them in green text, indicating that they are industry estimates. For our final charts, we only report numbers reported to us, and all of our actuals come directly from the distributing studio. Perhaps most importantly, congratulations to Markiplier on an incredible achievement. We’re excited to see a film like this bring people into theaters, and wish him all the best for a continued strong run! Bruce Nash, [email protected]

Everyone’s a winner at the movies this weekend, with all four new wide releases more than hitting their marks, and some surprising strength among the returning movies. Send Help will come out on top, based on current projections, with a strong $20-million opening. Markiplier’s Iron Lung is showing what direct fan engagement can do, with a remarkable $17.8-million debut. Melania will have the best opening for a documentary in a while (more on that in a moment). Finally, Shelter is coming in with a weekend total that’s poor by Jason Statham’s standards, but good for fledgling distributor Black Bear Pictures.

This weekend is just about the hardest one to forecast in all the time we’ve been running predictions. One fairly standard release—Send Help, from 20th Century Studios—lines up against two movies that are pretty much unprecedented: Mark Fischbach’s Iron Lung, and the documentary Melania. Added to that, we have a fourth wide release from a new distributor, with Black Bear Pictures releasing the Jason Statham action movie, Shelter. The level of uncertainty in the results for each movie is large, but here’s our best guess at how the weekend will work out.