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Tag: at the box office

  • The Grabber vs. CoHo: A Halloweekend Box Office Showdown

    Photo: Paramount Pictures

    Halloween weekend at the box office offered a few final scares, including a last-minute resurgence for Black Phone 2 and the reanimated corpse of BookTok powering the Colleen Hoover adaptation Regretting You. Behind them, Bugonia expanded to modest numbers, and One Battle After Another continued its run as the biggest points-earner of the season.

    It seemed as if Black Phone 2 would end its run at the top of the box-office charts after only a week when Chainsaw Man cut it down to size last weekend. But in classic horror movie fashion, the Ethan Hawke—fronted horror sequel rose up from the grave for one last scare. Initial estimates put the Grabber’s second outing neck and neck with (and even slightly behind) the rom-dram Regretting You, but when the numbers finally shook out, Black Phone 2 took the weekend’s top spot with $8.3 million, pushing its cumulative total to $61 million. Factoring in bonus points for clearing $50 million and finishing No. 1, Black Phone 2 is now at 126 total points, second to only One Battle After Another (192 points) on the overall leaderboard. Considering that 80 of those OBAA points are from the Gotham Awards nominations last week, Black Phone 2 is the league leader thus far in terms of pure box office. That’s good news for the 1,773 of you who had enough faith in the Grabber to pick the movie up for $5.

    Meanwhile, Regretting You held on admirably in its second week. It’s easy to forget now, but the 2024 film It Ends With Us wasn’t just the pretext for an extended media controversy and eventually the basis of a lawsuit involving Blake Lively and director-star Justin Baldoni. It was, in fact, a $350 million worldwide summer box-office smash, and a big factor in its success is that it was based on a hugely popular novel by Colleen Hoover. Regretting You — a romantic drama starring Allison Williams and Dave Franco that, as far as we know, has not generated any lawsuits — did not drum up nearly the kind of fervor as the previous Hoover adaptation. But at a cost of only $3, the 352 people who drafted the film have gotten decent value out of it so far.

    One Battle After Another picked up another $1 million and change in its sixth week, inching it ever closer to the $75 million bonus-point threshold. That’s nice, but after last week’s Gotham-nominations haul, box-office performance is about to become a marginal portion of OBAA’s greater points portfolio. The same likely cannot be said for Tron: Ares, which needed to be a $100 million–to–$200 million blockbuster to end up as a worthwhile buy for its 896 teams. At $67 million and with dwindling awards possibilities (maybe it will show up on the Oscars’ Visual Effects shortlist), that outcome seems unlikely.

    In terms of movies that are significant awards contenders, Bugonia expanded wide, pushing to $5 million cumulative and fifth place at the weekend box office. For comparison’s sake, Poor Things didn’t expand to 2,000-plus screens until its eighth week, but it still managed to clear $5 million in its third weekend, on only 800 screens, en route to a $34 million domestic take. On the other end of the Yorgos Lanthimos–Emma Stone line is last year’s Kinds of Kindness, which had made only $3.8 million after three weeks and on 900 screens. Bugonia’s box-office performance is closer to the Kinds of Kindness side of things, though the film’s awards prospects seem better.

    And now for our weekly banging of the Roofman drum: After four weeks in release, Roofman sits at a respectable $21 million, putting it ahead of the following movies:

    • Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere — $16M
    • The Smashing Machine — $11M
    • Bugonia — $5M
    • After the Hunt — $3M

    Does this mean anything? Is Roofman just at the top of a list of relatively low-earning movies with prestige elements that 20 years ago would have made five times what they’re making now? Perhaps! I still say let’s put Channing Tatum in the Oscars race.

    You can visit the MFL landing page to scope out the full leaderboard with information on mini-leagues — and join us on Discord for expanded stats and discussions.

    Predator: Badlands: November 7
    Christy: November 7
    Die My Love: November 7
    In Your Dreams: November 7
    Nuremberg: November 7
    Peter Hujar’s Day: November 7
    Sentimental Value: November 7
    Train Dreams: November 7
    Now You See Me: Now You Don’t: November 14
    The Running Man: November 14
    Jay Kelly: November 14
    Keeper: November 14
    Arco: November 14
    Come See Me in the Good Light: November 14 (Apple TV+)
    Left-Handed Girl: November 14
    Sirāt: November 14

    Gotham Awards: December 1
    New York Film Critics Circle announcement: December 2
    Film Independent Spirit Awards nominations: December 3
    Critics Choice Awards nominations: December 5
    Golden Globe nominations: December 8

    Joe Reid

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  • Another Anime Movie Conquers the Box Office This Weekend

    Here’s what you need to know about Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc.
    Photo: Tatsuki Fujimoto/Sony Pictures/Everett Collection

    This article originally ran on October 24. This weekend has seen Chainsaw Man beat estimates and top the box office this weekend.

    There’s yet another action anime blockbuster based on TV series based on a manga that has torn up the American box office this weekend. This one is called Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, and the Sony/Crunchyroll movie happens to be a fitting spooky-season release. Like Demon Slayer and Attack on Titan before it, the Chainsaw Man TV series, which is streaming on Crunchyroll and Hulu, is part supernatural horror, part coming-of-age story. The film serves as the latest chapter of the TV show, which is an adaptation of creator Tatsuki Fujimoto’s original manga. That made it a must-watch theatrical event for Chainsaw fans in the States and elsewhere. It dominated this weekend’s theatrical receipts, topping newcomers like Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere and Regretting You as well the film that was expected to win this weekend, the still-hot Black Phone 2.

    So what is Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc all about, and how did it conquer the box office like prior anime and anime-inspired animated films like Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle and KPop Demon Hunters? Here’s a quick rundown of the new film’s whole deal.

    Very: Latest estimates have it coming at $17.2 million for the weekend, which is about $6 million more than was anticipated by many observers before the weekend. For comparison, the popular, Blumhouse-produced horror sequel Black Phone 2 brought in a current estimated $13 million, per Deadline, while the new Colleen Hoover adaptation Regretting You is coming in a close third at $12.8 million. Meanwhile, the Jeremy Allen White-fronted Springtsteen: Deliver Me From Home is hitting its lower-end prediction with around $9.1 million.

    For starters, it’s a very literal title. One of 2022’s most exciting debuts and produced by the animation studio MAPPA, the anime is a hodgepodge of demonic violence, crude humor, and speculative fiction. In the world of Chainsaw Man, World War II never happened and now “devils” run amok. At the start of the series, the Chainsaw Devil meets a young man named Denji, and together they become the Chainsaw Man, a superpowered tough guy with spinning chainsaws that stick out of his hands and head, and join a squad of devil-hunting cops.

    Light spoilers incoming: After a bloody battle against a demonic villain called Samurai Sword (picture Chainsaw Man, but instead of chainsaws, he has samurai swords sticking out of his hands and head), the first season ended with a mysterious young woman cryptically wondering whether Denji would prefer to be a country mouse or a city mouse. Manga fans will know that that woman is Reze, a.k.a. the Bomb Devil, a girl whom Denji will fall for romantically — a series of events complicated by his prior attraction to his fellow devil hunter Makima. The trailer tees up his infatuation rom-com style before spinning into explosive action.

    In international markets, it has already earned $68.3 million since debuting on September 19, according to the theatrical tally the Numbers. While it’s unlikely to dethrone fellow Sony-released title Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle’s record-breaking box office, anime analyst Miles Atherton told Polygon it’s still among the most popular anime titles in North America. (Crunchyroll doesn’t share viewership numbers for its series.)

    Theatrical titles like Demon Slayer, Dan da Dan, and Attack on Titan all spun TV series into box-office moments, big and small. The release model has worked before for distributors Crunchyroll and Sony Pictures Releasing, which hold the international rights to Toho’s Chainsaw Man franchise. Similarly, the anime-inspired KPop Demon Hunters managed to make back the cost of nearly its entire production budget over just one weekend with a limited singalong theatrical event, despite being released straight to Netflix months earlier. That one is coming back to theaters for Halloween because it worked so well the first time around.

    For now it’s only in theaters, but eventually, like most of the aforementioned anime titles, we can expect to see it on Crunchyroll. We can’t be certain when, though. (Remember the monthslong wait for The Boy and the Heron?) Unlike American live-action films and their now ubiquitous 30-day windows, anime titles tend to circle most of the globe internationally before they go to streaming release.

    It probably couldn’t hurt to dive deeper into the lore and relationships, but the movie is relatively self-contained. Chainsaw Man is generally pretty direct — did I mention it’s about a man with chainsaws for hands? — so if you’re worried you’ll be confused, don’t be. Or watch a YouTube recap or two beforehand. It’s worth a spin regardless.

    There is. We won’t say too much as that would risk getting too deep into the events of the film, but we will say: Don’t miss it. It doesn’t tee up the next season or anything, but it does put a nice capper on the events of the movie.

    Eric Vilas-Boas

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