'Beetlejuice 2' Aims For $100M, 'Rebel Ridge' Rocks, 'Ocean's 14' Rumors Show Why Female-Led Successes Don't Count

'The Wolfman' got a trailer and the folks selling 'The Apprentice' are trying to convince you that Hollywood is scared of political controversy (instead of viewer indifference)

In today’s emotionally exhausting newsletter…

• Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice grossed a terrific $13 million in Wednesday/Thursday previews as it aims for a $100 million-plus domestic opening weekend. (free)

• The Wolfman’s trailer reminds us how much Universal’s post Dark Universe attempts to rehabilitate its Classic Monsters line got kneecapped by COVID. (free)

• Rebel Ridge is one of Netflix’s best programmers in ages, evidence that their non-prestige originals can be this good and proof you could make First Blood today.

• Word about a possible Ocean’s 14 again shows that female-led franchises like Ocean’s 8 are often ignored even when they succeed beyond expectations.

• Hollywood studios might have been reluctant to distribute The Apprentice due to politics, but the more likely reason was that they knew no one would watch it.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice starts great, great with $13 million in previews. 

Warner Bros. Discovery’s Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice earned $13 million in pre-release previews, counting both the Wednesday “early access” showings and the standard Thursday afternoon/evening showtimes. Yes, that’s two days of “advance night screenings” instead of one, but I’d argue anyone who showed up on Wednesday would have otherwise shown up on Thursday.  

In terms of September/October launches, it’s on par with (inflation notwithstanding) Venom ($10 million in October 2018 toward an $80 million opening), It: Chapter Two ($10.5 million in September 2019 on the way to a $89 million Fri-Sun launch), Venom: Let There Be Carnage ($11.5 million in October of 2021 toward a $90 million opening), Joker ($13.3 million in October 2019 toward a $96 million debut weekend) and It ($13.5 million in September 2017 on this frame toward a $123 million domestic opening). So, just running the raw math, we’d be looking at a Fri-Sun domestic launch between $94 million and $118 million.  

It’s also a (very soft) PG-13 “scary for kids but safe for parents” horror comedy with enormous youth-skewing appeal, thanks to Winona Ryder’s Stranger Things and both Tim Burton and Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday, regardless of whether the kids have “discovered” Beetlejuice in movie form, cartoon form or stage show musical form over the years. Casually curious moviegoers or folks with kids will wait until convenient Saturday and Sunday matinees. If we end up closer to It Chapter One (the top opening for September) than Joker (the top opening for October), there you go. Inside Out 2 nabbed $13 million on Thursday this past June before legging out to a $155 million launch over the weekend. 

 Is that probable? No, but the reviews (77% on Rotten Tomatoes… ironically better than Joker: Folie Au Duex, which nabbed a slew of high-level pans amid a halfway decent 61% score thus far… but that’s for a future post) and initial buzz are halfway decent. Even the negative notices assure audiences that they’ll get the mad-cap Burton madness they’d come to see. Meanwhile, amid a mostly R-rated (Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Alien: Romulus, Deadpool & Wolverine) and/or dystopian (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, A Quiet Place: Day One) summer, the industry has not had a PG-13 all-quadrants mega-title since – at best – Twisters in mid-July.  

Again, there are no terrible scenarios, especially as the film “only” cost $100 million (pretty cheap for a big-deal WB tentpole), so even if it opens closer to Dune Part Two ($81 million) than Barbie ($169 million), well, a win is a win. Offhand, if it plays like a regular tentpole, a 12.5% Thursday-to-weekend split would be around $104 million. 

The Wolf Man gets a trailer. 

Yes, it was a weird decision to essentially debut one of the “wolf man” characters not on a poster or a trailer but at the Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights event, which inevitably led to social media discourse from folks who can’t tell the difference between a costumed character in a theme park and the final product of a polished studio movie.  Whatever, Universal dropped the first trailer to Leigh Whannel’s The Wolfman this morning. This followed them offering a third trailer (one that weirdly played explicitly to folks who had seen and knew about the source material) for Wicked Part One while dodging both the “Yes, it’s a musical” variable and hiding that it’s still “Part One of Two.” Anyway, back to The Wolf Man. 

Does the “seemingly loving patriarch gets bitten by a wolf and becomes a metaphor for toxic masculinity” bit hue a bit close to Whannel’s Invisible Man redo? We’ll see, but Whannel’s previous offering was the best major studio movie of 2020. It was a ridiculously clever and on-point present-tense horror movie that A) didn’t rely on IP awareness and B) was the first one of these since Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy to make the title monster into an outright bad guy instead of a sympathetic anti-hero or glorified superhero (Renfield, Dracula Untold). Elisabeth Moss’s abusive ex (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) was a gaslighting asshole, an agent of carefully planned chaos sans a moment of empathy or nuance. It also had one of the best jump scares in recent memory. 

The Invisible Man was supposed to be a “fresh start” after Universal (to its credit) killed the Dark Universe in its crib after Tom Cruise’s underwhelming The Mummy. The world shut down less than a month after its release. Since then, we’ve had Renfield (an overbudgeted and overblown glorified superhero movie that I’d surmise it was part of the earlier interconnected universe plans) and Abigail (a loose riff on Dracula’s Daughter). Neither film succeeded, but hopefully, that’s just because vampires are uncool now. So, five years later, we have The Wolfman (starring Julia Garner and – instead of Ryan Gosling -- Christopher Abbott), which in a sane world would have likely opened in 2021 or 2022 while banking on the earned goodwill of the prior flick.  

A new chiller from the guy behind Upgrade and Invisible Man is an automatic genre event, and I’m guessing this cost closer to $25 million (Abigail) than $125 million (The Mummy). The Wolf Man nonetheless seems like a relic of pre-COVID plans when Universal tried to rehabilitate its “classic monsters” brand with promises to make real horror movies that prioritized the film unto itself over interconnectivity or IP brand maintenance. Of course, that notion should never go out of style, as (especially absent the constant online “respect the fans” distractions) making a good movie that works for those who show up is the best way to maintain a brand. This one opens on January 17, 2025, alongside the equally terrifying Paddington in Puru.