Weekend Box Office: It's Turkey Season, but things are still getting Freaky in theaters
America’s theater industry is in trouble, the government has shown no interest in helping anyone (let alone movie theaters), and the pandemic is actively getting worse in this country so it’s even less of a good idea to go see a movie than it was when theaters started opening back up.
With the stock disclaimer out of the way, let’s get to the numbers! This weekend’s box office report looks a lot like last weekend’s, and the weekend before that, and the weekend before that, but with the now-standard addition of one big new movie at the top of the charts and a handful of small new movies way down at the bottom. This weekend’s new movie is Freaky, the Vince Vaughn-starring horror take on Freaky Friday about a teen girl who body-swaps with a serial killer. It made $3.7 million, displacing last week’s winner, Let Him Go, which landed in second-place with the similarly now-standard dramatic box office drop (it made $1.8 million, less than half of last week).
After that is The War With Grandpa, which—unsurprisingly, given its star power and family-friendly premise—seems to have some relatively nice staying power. It made $1.3 for a total of $15.2. Next is Gillian Jacobs’ Come Play ($1.1 million), Liam Neeson’s Honest Thief ($800,000), and then a little film called Tenet (adding $735,000 to its $56 million total, which sounds like a lot but isn’t). After that is Guardians Of The Galaxy, because Disney would collapse if it didn’t make $406,000 by encouraging people to risk their lives at movie theaters with a movie that is probably played on TV somewhere over the weekend.
You have to scroll way down to numbers 12-15 to see the remaining block of new films—Come Away, Fatman, The Climb, and Ammonite—all of which only made between $80,000 and $110,000. As we’ve surely pointed out before, this illustrates just how untenable this whole situation is for theaters. One movie makes reasonably good money for one week, and if you’re not that movie, you’re screwed. Hell, with so few theaters open, even if you are that movie you’re screwed.
For a more detailed breakdown of this weekend’s box office numbers, head over to Box Office Mojo.