This year’s Thanksgiving box office weekend failed to improve over last year’s as Marvel Studios’ “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” did most of the heavy lifting with $64 million grossed over the 5-day period and accounted for roughly half of the weekend’s estimated $133 million overall gross, which is down from the $142 million reported last year.
With a running domestic total of $367 million after three weekends, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is now approximately 7% ahead of the domestic pace of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and should cross the $400 million mark by next weekend along with passing $700 million worldwide.
But the biggest shock of the weekend is Disney’s “Strange World,” which is turning out to be one of the biggest bombs in the history of the famed animation studio with a 5-day opening of just $18.6 million. It is an opening on par with the $16.5 million made by Disney’s infamous 2002 bomb “Treasure Planet,” and keep in mind, the total for that film is before inflation adjustment.
International markets offered no help for “Strange World” either. Between competition in theaters from “Wakanda Forever” and from the FIFA World Cup outside of it, the animated film grossed just $9.2 million from 43 overseas markets, giving it an anemic global launch of just $27.8 million. The final nail in the coffin is the film’s B CinemaScore, weighed down by adult male moviegoers, meaning that the film isn’t drawing in enough families or getting strong enough word-of-mouth from general audiences to leg out.
“Strange World” followed in the footsteps of films like “Moana” and “Encanto” as a Thanksgiving weekend release, but was expected to do worse than either of those with pre-weekend projections topping out at $30 million. As we noted this past week, the film was squeezed in between Disney’s marketing strategies and popular interest in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and “Avatar: The Way of Water,” and the film’s cast of a family of explorers didn’t lend itself to Disney’s usual marketing focus on photogenic heroines or fantastical protagonists like Wreck-It Ralph or Baymax.
Without the usual big Disney opening to boost numbers, the Thanksgiving period suffered as the adult offerings that were also released in theaters couldn’t carry the load. The strongest of the bunch is believed to be Netflix’s “Glass Onion,” the sequel to Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” that the streamer paid over $460 million for the filmmaker to bring over from Lionsgate.
While Netflix isn’t reporting box office numbers, distribution insiders believe that the film is earning a $12 million 5-day total from 698 theaters. Netflix is giving the film a limited engagement run in theaters before releasing it on streaming around the holidays.
In fourth is Sony’s “Devotion,” a Korean war film that is meeting projections with a $9 million 5-day opening from 3,405 theaters. Starring Jonathan Majors and Glen Powell, the film has received an A- on CinemaScore to go with Rotten Tomatoes scores of 79% critics and 92% audience and will now try to leg out among older moviegoers, though it has been difficult for films with serious subject matter to get a foothold theatrically.
Searchlight’s horror film “The Menu” completes the top five in its second weekend, taking in $7.4 million over the extended weekend. With a gory satire of fine dining, Searchlight is trying to appeal to younger audiences, mostly in coastal cities, who have turned out this year for specialty films like “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Pearl” that provide a different flavor of big screen spectacle. “The Menu” has a running domestic total of $18.7 million.
Other specialty films that opened outside the top 5 include MGM’s “Bones and All,” a cannibal horror romance from director Luca Guadagnino that opened to $3.6 million, and Universal’s “The Fabelmans,” the Oscar frontrunner from Steven Spielberg that expanded nationwide to around 638 theaters and earned $3.1 million.
More to come…
