It seems like I am talking about how bad the weekend will be at the box office every week, but this weekend will be quite bad!
With only one major new release, the horror film Barbarian featuring Pennywise himself Bill Skarsgard, opening wide on over 2200 screens, this one stands the best chance at finishing first. Tracking for Barbarian has it sitting slightly better than the recent horror disappointment The Invitation, which finished its inaugural weekend just under $7 Million. The upside for this Airbnb thriller is its R rating and its quite stellar reviews, sitting at an impressive 94% on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing. I think those two factors and the start of the fall movie season will see this one actually perform better than expected and start around $10 Million.
The real wild card of this weekend will be the release of the Hindi language film Brahmāstra: Part One- Shiva opening on 750 screens. Hoping to recreate the success of RRR, which opened to $9.5 Million back in March 2022. Although Brahmāstra is opening on nearly 500 fewer screens than RRR, I think the market is there to make this one a decent-sized hit this weekend with around $5 Million in receipts and a third-place finish
From there, we are looking at holdovers Top Gun: Maverick, Bullet Train and DC League of Super Pets to round out the top five.
The bad news is that the fall movie season will get off to a ho-hum start. The good news is in the weeks ahead, there are some titles to actually get excited about, including the Viola Davis-starring The Woman King, the Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan-starring See How They Run, and the endlessly in the headlines Don’t Worry Darling featuring the always amazing Florence Pugh.
Will you be venturing to the theaters this weekend? Or will the Tom Hanks starring Pinocchio streaming option from visionary director Robert Zemeckis be enough to keep you in? Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to check back on Saturday when we give an update on the weekend numbers.