Battle at the Box Office 11/6/23
November got off to a whimper with one of the worst performing weekends of the year at the box office as Five Nights at Freddy’s nose-dived (but still held onto the top spot) while there was a lack of new major releases.
Five Nights at Freddy’s dropped 76% from last weekend’s massive opening, a huge drop even by the normally steep standards of horror movies. FNAF made another $19.4 million, bringing it to $113.6 million total domestically so far and $216.2 million. Given that it’s a Blumhouse release, the budget was kept at a reasonably low $20 million, so it’s already made at least 10x its budget worldwide, so Universal is probably not sweating things too badly even with that massive drop. While Peacock didn’t seem to be a factor last weekend, it could have been this weekend, with potentially anyone who may have gone out again to see the movie opting to just watch it again on streaming if they have Peacock. It’s also post-Halloween, so the movie lost any boost that the spooky holiday provided.
Taylor Swift remained in second place with The Eras Tour taking in another $13.5 million. The concert film now has $165.9 million domestically and $218.4 million worldwide. It’s currently sitting just outside the domestic top ten for the year and if it can pull in around $10 million or so more, it will pass Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One and Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny to enter the top 10.
Killers of the Flower Moon stayed in third place with another $6.8 million, bringing it to $52.2 million domestically and $119 million worldwide. It’s just behind the domestic gross for The Color of Money and around $61 million off from Hugo worldwide, which made just over $180 million.
Priscilla and Radical rounded out the top 5. A24’s Priscilla Presley biopic took in $5 million as it expanded to wide release and currently has $5.3 million domestically. It’s obviously nowhere near the opening of Baz Luhrman’s Elvis from last year, which opened to over $31 million, but that was a massively hyped summer blockbuster and this was a much smaller-scale drama. For Sophia Coppola, it’s hard to directly compare, as all her movies start limited except for Marie Antoinette, which Priscilla’s first wide weekend was almost on par with. Radical made $2.6 million in 419 theaters for fifth place.
The “big” story from this past weekend was the non-performance of The Marsh King’s Daughter. The Daisy Ridley/Ben Mendelsohn starring thriller didn’t even open in the top 10, opening in 13th place behind the re-release of The Nightmare Before Christmas with only $849,006 in 1,005 theaters, which is about $850 per theater for the entire weekend, which if you say $15 a ticket, is about 56 tickets for the entire weekend in each theater. It’s based on a best-selling book and had the backing of Lionsgate with some fairly big stars, so you would expect to do at least over $1 million but this is a catastrophic opening that will surely lose Lionsgate some money, which they are surely hoping will be canceled out by The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in a few weeks.
The Holdovers took the Per Theater average with $8,875 in 64 theaters over the weekend. The Holdovers was the Per Theater winner last weekend as well and the movie expands into wide release this coming weekend.