The early box office results are starting to roll in, and as expected, it looks like The Gipper is no match for the MCU’s Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems set to top the charts one last time this Labor Day weekend. Indeed, the Dennis Quaid-led Reagan, a biopic of the 40th President of the United States, is performing more-or-less in line with what we predicted, with Deadline reporting its $500k preview night should land it somewhere around $7 or 8 million for the weekend. That’s not a bad result for an independently released movie. Critics don’t like the biopic much, and many complain that the faith-based film presents the president as a saint-like figure. However, the folks buying tickets seem to love it, with the movie having a terrific 98% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. So, there’s a chance word-of-mouth could propel this movie to a higher opening.
However, it’s unlikely the movie has a prayer of competing with Deadpool & Wolverine, which is on track to make in the $12 million-ish range. One thing in the movie’s favor is that it’s getting a re-release this weekend on the premium screens it had to lose when Alien: Romulus opened.
The weekend’s other new release, AfrAId, a Blumhouse production about a family terrorized by AI, is on track for a disastrous $4-5 million weekend. The barely promoted horror flick only made about $400k in previews, and the reviews have been brutal, with our own Tyler Nichols slamming it as “just another in a line of bad PG-13 Blumhouse horror movies with no soul or originality.”
To note, Labor Day weekend has always been slow, with many theatres using the weekend to play classic films, with some theatres playing a 50th-anniversary re-release of Blazing Saddles. I caught this last weekend, and the classic comedy Western still plays like gangbusters, so if it’s open in your neighbourhood, I’d check it out (the controversial 4K re-release of The Terminator is worth catching, too).
What (if anything) are you seeing this weekend?