Box Office Discussion: "Taylor" Made

 Despite a big drop, Taylor Swift held on for a second week, while Killers of the Flower Moon had a solid, but not spectacular, opening.

(Still going through the backlog)

Successful concert films tend to have little staying power.  Former all-time concert film champ Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, for example, plunged from 2nd to 6th in its second weekend.  One Direction: This Is Us managed to gross more than half its final gross its opening weekend.  So the fact that Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour fell 64% shouldn't be much of a surprise.  This was marketed as an event, a chance for Taylor fans to come together to re-experience, or experience for the first time, the magic of the concert, and they flocked there last weekend.  That said, Taylor had enough fans that, even with the drop, Eras took in $33.2 million, an amount that, all by itself, would make it the fifth-highest concert film of all time (fourth if we remove Eras from the top of the chart).  Taylor's version now has a ten-day total of $132 million.

Martin Scorsese's three-and-a-half-hour epic crime drama Killers of the Flower Moon, about the string of murders of the Osage after oil was discovered on their land in the 1920s, couldn't come close to the standard set over the summer by Oppenheimer.  But, compared to most of last year's serious, Oscar-contending dramas, it had a blockbuster opening.  The film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, opened to $23.3 million, making it Scorsese's third-best opening, behind the considerably more commercial (and considerably shorter) The Departed and Shutter Island (both of which starred DiCaprio).  That's enough for it to have already outgrossed six of last year's ten Best Picture nominees.  We'll see if the awards attention is enough to get the film over $100 million.

Even though Halloween was less than two weeks away, that didn't help the top horror movie out right now, The Exorcist: Believer.  The poorly-received attempt to reboot the venerable franchise could only manage $5.7 million to bring its total to $54.3 million.  While the film itself was reasonably budgeted at $30 million, the rights to purchase the franchise will likely make this a money loser.  The good news for Universal is that they have another horror movie just around the corner, one that will likely prove much more profitable than Exorcist.

Thanks to the lack of new competing family films, Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie continues to hit above its weight, barking up another $4.4 million for a total of $56 million.

30 years ago, Disney had two Halloween films ready for release.  Rather than let them compete in October, the studio sent Hocus Pocus to July and gave The Nightmare Before Christmas the spooky season spot, probably figuring that with the blending of both Halloween and Christmas, the film might just play through the holidays.  That wasn't a bad bet, as Nightmare would win both the pre and post-Halloween weekends and hang around the box office Top 10 until early December, ultimately grossing $50 million.  Now, two weeks after Hocus Pocus's mildly received 30th anniversary re-release, Nightmare has its own, and once again, easily beat the Sanderson Sisters.  It opened to $4.3 million, or just a tad less than what Pocus has been able to do in its three weeks.

Saw X continues to be scarily profitable, scraping up another $3.6 million to bring the successful re-launch of the franchise to $47.3 million.  The Creator isn't a high-profile bomb like, say, The Flash, but a bomb it is, as it could pull in only $2.7 million for a total of $36.8 million.  

Also going down as a disappointment is A Haunting in Venice, which might just be sticking around because of its title.  It picked up $1.1 million for a total of $41 million.  The Blind, the Duck Dynasty biopic, continues to exceed its modest expectations, as it brings in $1 million for a total of $15.7 million.  Rounding out the Top 10 is The Nun II, which now has a total of $85.3 million.

Halloween weekend is usually a slow weekend, as the combination of parties both Friday and Saturday nights and the impending arrival of the holiday movie season usually results in most new releases being dumps.  This year, however, we have a rare 500-pound gorilla, in the form of an animatronic bear.  Five Nights at Freddy's is the long-awaited adaption of the hugely popular video game series, starring Josh Hutcherson, who has largely been absent from movie screens since The Disaster Artist in 2017, playing a new security guard at a closed-down pizzeria who discovers that the animatronic animals can come to life at night--and aren't exactly friendly.  The film has been in development for so long that two films that ripped off the basic premise (The Banana Splits Movie and Willy's Wonderland) came and went several years ago, but it is finally here.  There was some concern when Universal announced the film would be debuting day and date on Peacock, but tracking indicates its heading for a strong opening, one that might leave stablemate Exorcist in the dust after just one weekend.  Also heading to theaters is the documentary After Death, from Angel Studios, which turned Sound of Freedom into the year's least likely blockbuster, and a John Cena action comedy called Freelance.  Will it be three nights of Freddy's this weekend, or will Taylor swiftly make short work of the robots?  We'll find out next week.