UPDATED, Friday PM: The Glicked weekend is currently looking like a $120 million opening for Universal’s Wicked after a $48.5M Friday plus previews, while Gladiator II is shaping up to $23.5M in Friday/previews turning into a $61M opening weekend at 3,573 locations.

Generally, midday projections are conservative, so we’ll see whether there’s a rush of ladies tonight, and families into tomorrow, for Wicked. Per Comscore/Screen Engine’s PostTrak, 71% women showed up last night. Gladiator II is more the date-night movie with 61% men and 39% women showing up to Thursday screenings.

For the month of November, Wicked currently ranks as the 10th biggest opening ever at the domestic box office, while also feasibly breaking the opening record for a movie based on a Broadway musical, defeating Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods ($31M). It’s also the third biggest opening of 2024 year to date, ahead of Warner Bros’ Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ($111M). Wicked Part One, before P&A, cost $150M. The Jon M. Chu-directed title is booked at 3,888 theaters and is currently expected to post a $30,800 per-theater average.

PostTrak exits are strong for Wicked with 5 stars for general audiences and parents, and 4 1/2 stars for kids under 12. It’s a generational draw whereby the moms who saw it when hit Broadway in 2003 as children are now in their 30s taking their own kids to the movie. Wicked gets a 90% positive with a through-the-roof 80% definite recommend.

As we mentioned before, Gladiator II was always shaping up to be Ridley Scott’s biggest opening at the domestic box office, besting Hannibal ($58M). It’s also Denzel Washington’s best stateside start, ahead of American Gangster ($43.5M), which was also a movie he did with Scott. As we told you earlier in the week, the sequel, which got a head start ahead of Wicked abroad, already crossed the century mark at the overseas box office. Gladiator II PostTrak exits are also solid at 4 stars and a 77% positive.

Meanwhile, Amazon MGM Studios’ Red One is seeing a second Friday of $3.4M, and a second weekend of $13.5M, -58%, for a running total of $53M at 4,032 sites. The $200M-$250M Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans production crossed the $100M global mark today.

Angel Studios has a wide release this weekend, the period drama thriller Bonhoeffer. Pastor. Spy. Assassin at 1,900 sites, which is looking like $2.4M today and $4.8M for the weekend in fourth place. The Todd Komarnicki-directed and -written thriller follows Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who joins a deadly plot to assassinate Hitler, risking his faith and fate to save millions of Jews from genocide.

Fifth goes to Sony’s fifth weekend of Venom: The Last Dance with a $900K Friday and $4M weekend, taking its domestic tally to $133.8M.

FRIDAY AM UPDATED AFTER EXCLUSIVE: Universal is calling Wicked Part One‘s previews at $19.2 million.

That number for the Jon M. Chu-directed, Cynthia Erivo- and Ariana Grande-starring feature take of the Broadway musical is comprised of Monday and Wednesday fan screenings, plus Thursday’s previews that began at 2 p.m.

Broken down: Monday’s Amazon Prime screenings generated $2.5M at 750 theatres in the U.S. Wednesday advance screenings grossed another $5.7M from 2,000 theaters in the U.S. and Canada. Standard previews yesterday at 3,300 theaters yielded a total Thursday gross of $11M.

Just in terms of pure advance cash, Wicked is just under the $23M preview cash of Disney’s 2019 The Lion King, and Warner Bros’ Barbie at $22.3M (that gross wsa from both Wednesday and Thursday shows). It’s way ahead of Disney’s 2017 live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast ($16.3M). Updated gut from tracking this AM on Wicked is $120M+. The other factor to keep in mind on heavy female-skewing movies is that they can cave on a Saturday, e.g., Barbie was down 32% off Friday/previews and Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 was off 26%. But there are exceptions, particularly on movies that have a family factor, e.g., Beauty and the Beast dipped -2% between its Friday to Saturday.

Paramount’s official number on the R-rated Gladiator II is $6.5M at 3,200 locations. That preview figure is right in the neighborhood of myriad recent sequels that delivered varying openings, including Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes ($6.6M previews, $58.4M 3-day), No Time to Die ($6.3M, $55.2M) and Bad Boys for Life ($6.3M, $62.5M). There’s also the Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny comp. Tracking’s updated forecast for the sequel epic directed by Ridley Scott and starring Paul Mescal and Denzel Washington is $59M-$66M. Rotten Tomatoes audience score is a healthy 84%.

RELATED: Jon M. Chu’s ‘Wicked’ Soundtrack: What Songs Are In ‘Part 1’?

Keeping tabs: The running cume for the 2024 box office through November 17 stood at $7 billion, $889M behind the same period in 2023 and 9% ahead of the same period in 2022 (the Top Gun: Maverick box office year). This is all according to Comscore. Starting this weekend through New Year’s Eve, can we clear another $2 billion to get us to last year’s $9B final?

PREVIOUS EXCLUSIVE: From New York City to Kansas and onward to the City of Angels, mobs are going to the movies tonight as Universal’s long-awaited Wicked Part One and Paramount’s Gladiator II square off for what is expected to be one of the year’s richest weekends. To date, the biggest weekend for all titles year-to-date was July 26-28, per Comscore, when Deadpool & Wolverine sent the entire marketplace to $285.3 million.

Early figures tonight — not attributed to any studios because they stay mum until tomorrow morning — is that Wicked is casting an estimated spell of $8M tonight alone. However, if you count Monday’s Amazon promotion previews and last night’s premium-format fan showings, that total preview tally flies to around $20M, I hear. As we told you previously, we heard presales were around $30M; however, once there’s a must-see title for female moviegoers, they’ll definitely book a date to the cinema. With walk-up business unpredictable, the outlook is wild for Wicked, with a three-day total estimated between $130M-$150M. The argument on the lower end of the projection is that the Jon M. Chu-directed, Marc Platt-produced movie is 2 hours and 40 minutes.

The biggest opening for any feature musical is Jon Favreau’s 2019 The Lion King at $191.7M; it had a runtime of 1 hour and 58 minutes. The biggest opening for a movie based on a Broadway musical is Into the Woods ($31M). Universal’s Mamma Mia! sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, opened bigger at $34.9M, however, that wasn’t based on stage musical IP. Wicked has all the spells to overperform this weekend at 90% certified fresh with critics and a 99% audiences score on Rotten Tomatoes.

RELATED: ‘Wicked’ Movie Cast: Who Plays Who?

Words cannot to begin to detail the amount of marketing oomph Universal put behind this movie, and more amazingly, they did so on the feature adaptation of a Broadway musical — a genre with which Hollywood has a love-hate relationship. Wicked‘s marketing playbook makes Disney’s promotional plans for Star Wars: The Force Awakens look like some grassroots guerrilla stunt for a SXSW movie.

Granted, the means by which Uni made its preview cash is apples to oranges compared with previous titles, however, in terms of pure dollars, Wicked‘s total cash is ahead of Beauty and the Beast‘s $16.3M as well as The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1‘s $17M, both female-skewing tentpoles. Beauty and the Beast clocked at 2 hours and 9 minutes and opened to $174.7M, while Mockingjay 1 was 2 hours and 3 minutes and debuted to $121.8M.

Gladiator II, meanwhile is between $6.5M-$7M and that’s for Thursday alone. Duly note, Paramount didn’t have big preview days in advance, just a small 200-theater “Screen Unseen” sneak. Critics really have nothing to complain about with the Ridley Scott-directed sequel at 72% certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Gladiator II‘s preview dough is akin to that of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ($7.2M Thursday) which got it to a $60.3M opening. That’s right around what Gladiator II is expected to conquer by Sunday.

As we always say on Thursday, take these estimates with a grain of salt. If the studio reports lower, it doesn’t necessarily mean a movie is without momentum.

RELATED: Where To Watch ‘Gladiator’: Is Ridley Scott’s 2000 Film Streaming?

What was clear from Deadline’s rounds at theaters tonight is if you want to get your wiccan on, ya dress up and head over to the TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, or you head to a place that’s no place like home: re Dorothy’s home in Kansas City, KS. Meanwhile, over at the AMC in Burbank, CA, which is usually any film’s highest-grossing cinema in the nation in a given weekend, the 6 p.m. Imax of Gladiator II was sold out.

Natalie Sitek contributed to this report.

RELATED: All The ‘Wicked’ Press Tour Looks So Far: From Ariana Grande’s Glinda Pink To Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba Green