by Nathaniel R
Staying power or lack of competition? Halloween, A Star is Born, and Venom held on to the top three spots in wide release (with Venom booting Crazy Rich Asians out of the top ten films of 2018...sigh) while the platforming Oscar hopefuls continued their slow crawl towards public awareness beyond people like us if you know what I mean...
| Weekend Box Office Estimates (October 26-28) |
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| W I D E 800+ screens |
PLATFORM / LIMITED excluding prev. wide |
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| 1. Halloween $32 (cum. $126.6) Review |
1. 🔺 Johnny English Strikes Again $1.6 on 544 screens *NEW* |
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| 2. A Star is Born $14.1 (cum. $148.7) Review, Soundtracking, Podcast |
2. 🔺 Free Solo $1 on 394 screens (cum. $5.1) |
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| 3. Venom $10.8 (cum. $187.2) |
3. 🔺 Beautiful Boy $592k on 192 screens (cum. $1.4) Podcast |
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| 4. Goosebumps 2 $7.5 (cum. $38.3) | 4. Gosnell: The Trial of... $389k on 467 screens (cum. $3.2) |
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| 5.🔺Hunter Killer $6.6 *NEW* |
5. 🔺 Can You Ever Forgive Me? $380k on 25 screens (cum. $610k) Review, Podcast |
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| 6. The Hate U Give $5.1 (cum. $18.3) Review |
6. Colette $327k on 235 screens (cum. $4.4) Capsule, Podcast |
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| 7. First Man $4.9 (cum. $37.8) Capsule Review, Podcast |
7. 🔺 Suspiria $179k *NEW* on 2 screens |
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| 8. Smallfoot $4.7 (cum. $72.5) Warner Animation |
8. 🔺 Wildlife $111k on 18 screens (cum. $249k) Review, Carey Mulligan |
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| 9. Night School $3.2 (cum. $71.4) |
9. 🔺 The Happy Prince $80k on 71 screens (cum. $224k) Trailer |
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| 10. 🔺Mid90s $3 (cum. $3.3) |
10. Tea with the Dames $80k on 67 screens (cum. $576k) |
| 🔺 = new or expanding theater count numbers (in millions unless otherwise noted) from box office mojo |
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A handful of scattered thoughts...
• Suspiria had the weekend's best per screen average by far with nearly $90,000 on each of its screens. Makes you think they should have gone at least a little wider (like the top 10 markets or something for opening weekend?). It's always strange when buzzy horror films decide to skip valuable Halloween dollars like this one is doing. Remember when The Babadook did that too? Odd.
• The Wife has finally left the limited release top ten in its 11th week of release. Good solid arthouse run, though, with $7.6 million in the bank.
• Venom booted Crazy Rich Asians out of the top ten films of 2018...which is a loss for originals (it's unlikely we'll have any non-franchise films in the top ten by years end since A Quiet Place will surely fall to a franchise title in the next month)... but what can you do? Movie culture has been trending away from original titles for years.
• Border, Sweden's Oscar submission, had a decent debut with $71,000 from 7 theaters despite little publicity. Burning, South Korea's Oscar submission is off to a slower start with $28,000 from 2 theaters.
• While the new Gerard Butler film Hunter Killer didn't light the world on fire (how many generic action movies has he made now?), it performed a lot better than the only other brand new wide release, Indivisible a Christian war drama, which didn't crack the top ten.
What did you see this weekend and which movie are you most impatient to get in your town?