M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Glass’ To Smash Around $75M Over MLK Weekend

2019 can rely on Blumhouse/Universal/BVI’s Glass as the first box office hit of the New Year.

The M. Night Shyamalan-directed sequel to his 2000 title Unbreakable and 2016 film Split came on tracking today with a 4-day start that’s around $75M per industry sources. The pic opens on Jan. 18. We hear other tracking services have Glass‘ debut around $50M.

Should that estimate hold up, Glass will rank as the second best MLK weekend opening ever behind Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper ($107.2M) from 2015. Glass, which is also written and produced by Shyamalan, follows Bruce Willis’ security guard, David Dunn, who uses his supernatural abilities to track down Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a disturbed man who has twenty-four personalities. That character was introduced in Shyamalan’s Split which became a January surprise last year opening to $40M, and making $138.2M domestic, $278.4M WW off a $9M production cost. Raising the stakes in Glass is the return of Samuel L. Jackson’s Unbreakable bad guy Mr. Glass.

Total unaided awareness for Glass —that survey category where those being polled bring up the film’s title without being prompted– is higher than that of Blumhouse/Universal’s Get Out and Split. First Choice for Glass is higher than Conjuring 2, The Nun, Get Out and just under that of Logan. In total awareness, Glass is strong across the board with males and females.

Disney’s foreign arm, Buena Vista International, is handling overseas rights on Glass. The studio originally handled Shyamalan’s Unbreakable which made $95M stateside, $248.1M WW. Producer Jason Blum re-teams with Shyamalan after working on the filmmaker’s Split and The Visit. Marc Bienstock and Ashwin Rajan also produce.