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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
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Joe Reid
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