Original Coverage & Source Attribution: scottmendelson.substack.com
With a variety of new releases pulling, to varying degrees, decent initial domestic grosses, the weekend should total roughly $115 million, a solid 36% bump from last year’s fall kick-off weekend. Last year’s seasonal starting pistol offered just one major new release, 20th Century Studios’ Predator: Badlands, which topped the box office with a solid $40 million gross. This year’s fall kick-off weekend saw Hollywood try a new idea: releasing not one (01) major new movie, but several major newbies. And while not every one of these new releases will succeed on its own merits, well, more movies = more money.
Glancing at the weekend, we’ve got (spitball estimates) Godzilla: Minus Zero (a grimdark, R-rated, Japanese kaiju sequel) topping the weekend with over/under $30 million after a boffo $14.5 million Friday gross, but also The Cat in the Hat (which I mostly enjoyed) debuting with around $19 million and Ramayana pulling $8 million over the Fri-Sun portion of a $11.5 million debut frame. Oh, and Angel Studios’ Revolutionary War musical Drummer Boy will also gross around $8 million over the weekend, while Wild Horse Nine debuts with $5.5 million in 1,100 theaters and Fathom Entertainment’s Jimmy opens to $2.27 million in 1,470 locales.
Hell, $1.1 million worth of moviegoers will show up this weekend to watch already-released episodes of Prime Video’s buzzy gay hockey romance Heated Rivalry. Throw in exceptionally solid holds (with drops between 19% and 32%) for You Can See Everything, Wildwood, Wicker and Clayface, plus promising platform launches for A24’s Club Kid ($390k in six theaters), and Amazon MGM’s I Play Rocky ($305k in seven theaters), and, well, I played catch-up yesterday with the WB toon and the new Martin McDonagh flick and in both cases struggled with overcrowded parking lots. The sheer amount of ‘spread the wealth’ is almost mind-boggling.
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