The makers of A Quiet Place: Day One will need help keeping quiet about the film’s success at the box office, with $6.8M earned in Thursday previews. The total is a record high for the franchise and a more significant opening than some of the summer’s other blockbusters, like Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which opened with $6.6M in previews. If A Quiet Place: Day One keeps up the pace, the third film in the intense horror thriller franchise could shout its supremacy with $50M for its 3-day launch window.
Elsewhere, Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga hit the dusty trailer below expectations with $800K in previews. However, it’s worth noting that the target audience differs from those who rush to theaters for Thursday screenings. For many, Horizon is a Friday Date Night film or even a weekend afternoon wind-down to beat the summer heat and doldrums of the work week. We can expect the movie to fare better throughout the week. Still, it isn’t easy to know how much until the numbers come in.
Thankfully, Pixar’s Inside Out 2 still draws crowds after reaching $863.1M worldwide, beating the original film’s lifetime total of $859M. It only took Inside Out 2 16 days to outperform its predecessor and become number 19 on the highest-earning animated films list. Inside Out 2 is the ninth most successful domestic animated film ever, with $411.8M, overtaking 2013’s Frozen.
While John Krasinski directed A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place: Part II, he has passed the helm of this one over to Michael Sarnoski. A few years ago, Sarnoski earned a lot of positive attention with his feature directorial debut, Pig.
The story of A Quiet Place: Day One, which is credited to Krasinski and Sarnoski, does take place in the same world established in the first two movies but doesn’t involve the Abbott family, the characters we followed through the first two movies. Deadline’s sources said that after seeing Pig and being blown away by the film, Krasinski quickly put Sarnoski on the short list of directors to take a meeting for the project. While insiders say Sarnoski’s vision for the film was still his own and different from what Krasinski had done with the first two, he still gave a pitch that fit the tone of the world they had created and felt he was the perfect fit for their next installment.
JoBlo’s Editor-in-Chief, Chris Bumbray, reviewed A Quiet Place: Day One. You can read his review here.