The box office hot streak continues thanks to a decent debut from the animated film The Grinch and strong holds from A Star is Born and Bohemian Rhapsody. However, the weekend’s other new releases, The Girl in the Spider’s Web and Overlord both failed to connect with audiences.
Illumination Studios continues its hot streak of mid budget (Grinch cost just $75 million, compared to $150-200 million for most Pixar films), explicitly children-targeted films with strong box office. Their latest, The Grinch, pulled in $67.5 million in its opening, enough to easily win the box office, and the largest animated opening since The Incredibles 2 in June. The opening is just slightly down from The Lorax and Despicable Me 3, which opened with $70.2 million and $72.4 million respectively, before finishing at $214.0 million and $264.6 million. With the holidays approaching, The Grinch should be able to clear $250 million despite upcoming competition from Fantastic Beasts and Wreck-it Ralph sequels.
In second place is Bohemian Rhapsody with an impressive 38.9% drop for $31.2 million in its second weekend and $100.3 million to date. After this strong hold, and such a positive reception from audiences, the Freddie Mercury biopic should is on its way to dethroning Straigh Outta Compton‘s $161.1 million in 2015 to become the highest grossing musical biopic of all time. Additionally, the movie will soon dethrone 1999’s The Birdcage ($124 million) as the highest grossing film starring an LGBTQ+ character, despite many criticizing the film for its portrayal of Mercury’s sexuality. The fact that BoRap is only the third film starring an LGBTQ+ character to gross over $100 million at the domestic box office (the third being 1994’s Interview with a Vampire) is discouraging and shows the need for better representation, especially as films like Moonlight, Call Me by Your Name and Love, Simon have been thriving critically and commercially, while record breaking films like Wonder Woman, Black Panther, Crazy Rich Asians and Get Out have proven that diverse stories can still attract huge audiences.
Third place is action/horror/WWII film Overlord, bringing in $10.2 million, just slightly below my slightly optimistic forecast. This is a disappointing result for the $38 million film, and it will likely join last month’s Bad Times at the El Royale ($7.1 million opening, approx. $17.8 million total) as an R-Rated action film that will find a cult audience when available for home viewing. In fact, Bad Times might be the best indicator for Overlord’s domestic total. Replicating it’s 2.5x multiplier will give Overlord a domestic total of $25.5 million.
Disney’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms avoided a complete disaster as it dropped a bad-not-horrible 50.4% for $10.0 million in its second weekend, and $35 million so far. It may end up with $50 million when all is said and done, but just barely.
A Star is Born has some impressive staying power, remaining in the top five for a sixth week, dropping a scant 26.3% (the exact amount it dropped week four) for $8.1 million and $178.1 million so far. There’s not much to say about the film that hasn’t been said already- it really is one of the biggest success stories of the year.
Debuting outside the top five with a disastrous $7.8 million is Sony’s “rebootquel” The Girl in the Spider’s Web: A New Dragon Tattoo Story. While most of my predictions were spot on (just 0.6% off on Grinch and 2.2% off on BoRap), I really overestimated this film, thinking it would hit $10 million. As I wrote about fairly extensively in my preview, Girl had a lot working against it, and clearly could not overcome those issues. Sony’s best decision was halving the budget from the 2011 version, down to $43 million, which should help mitigate the damage, but this is a bomb, and it may not even hit $20 million domestically. Sony should be sending David Fincher and Rooney Mara an apology right about now.
The rest of the top 10 are as follows:
7.) Nobody’s Fool– $6.6 million, $24.3 million to date (decent, should turn a profit)
8.) Venom– $4.9 million, $206.2 million to date (continues to impress with its holds)
9.) Halloween– $3.9 million, $156.9 million to date (falling quickly now that we’ve passed Halloween)
10.) The Hate U Give– $2.0 million, $26.6 million (modest hit)
That’s it for this week. Next weekend will be busy, with the opening of the next installment of the Harry Potter spinoff franchise, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, as well as comedy Instant Family and crime thriller Widows.
Film Central 