Box Office: ‘Back to Black’ Bombs With $3M as ‘Strangers Chapter 1’ Earns $12M

'Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes' has passed $235 million worldwide but 'The Fall Guy' won't get much farther than $150 million globally

In weekend box office news that isn’t IF, which opened with a rock-solid $35 million, giving Ryan Reynolds his second $25 million-plus debut for an original programmer in less than three years…

Lionsgate’s The Strangers Part 1 opened with $12 million in its domestic debut. That’s a solid opening for Renny Harlin’s slasher prequel/remake/whatever with an $8.5 million budget. Bryan Bertino’s seemingly one-and-done home invasion thriller was a bonafide sleeper hit in the summer of 2008, earning $82 million from a $10 million budget. I took no issue with the surprisingly solid The Strangers: Prey at Night. The 2018 release, which earned $31 million on a $5 million budget, at least swapped out the victims, offering not a couple in conflict (she had just turned down his marriage proposal) but a parents-and-kids family unit. However, The Strangers Part 1 is A) the first of an already-shot trilogy that serves as an origin story prequel to the 2008 picture and B) a near-identical glorified remake of the 2008 film.

Theaters and studios need every win they can get. Still, I won’t pretend that I’m not concerned that audiences showed up in such numbers to pay movie theater prices to see an inferior version of a film currently available on Max and to rent for $4 on all mainstream VOD platforms. Maybe if the likes of Lisa Frankenstein and Abigail were performing better, I wouldn’t care, but… if horror becomes as much of a franchise-driven genre as every other theatrical genre, then we are all in big trouble. The film earned expectedly terrible reviews, but its C CinemaScore grade is fine for a horror flick. This is another “prequel to the movie we wanted to make” situation. However, since the whole trilogy has already been shot, at least it’s not a bluff. So… yay?

Focus Features’ Back to Black debuted with just $2.85 million in its debut weekend. That’s not a shock considering A) Amy Winehouse was/is a far bigger deal in the United Kingdom and B) most of the discourse centered on to what extent the Sam Taylor Johnson-directed biopic focused on her addiction over her musical talent and blamed the late singer for her downfall. Marisa Abela is quite good, as she is on Industry and even does her own singing. I’ll happily defend Fifty Shades of Grey, which, like Catherine Hardwicke’s first Twilight, stands out from the more author-controlled sequels. I’ll defend John Goodman’s The Babe (which I loved as a kid) unto death, but — fair or not, it’s probably not a commercially intelligent play to make a biopics that pisses off that person’s biggest fans.

And yes, this is ba5 minutes of (to quote Walk Hard) “Goddamit, this is a dark fucking period!” More broadly speaking, the film doesn’t offer any new insights or knowledge that couldn’t be better gleaned from the 2015 documentary Amy or the Winehouse episode of You’re Wrong About, which has become a one-stop podcast shop for “We don’t need a biopic.” Whether an adaptation of or a response to the documentary (which was less flattering to those in Winehouse’s life), it’s another (commercially) needless feature film adaptation (The Walk, Welcome to Marwin, Our Brand is Crisis, Lords of Dogtown, etc.) of a documentary. Like English-language remakes of overseas features (Ambulance, Cold Pursuit, Another Round, The Upside, etc.), this provides an alibi for skittish executives to justify what’s otherwise a non-IP, star-plus-concept, non-franchise feature.

NEON released Pamela Adlon’s Babes into 12 theaters this weekend. It’s a sign of the times, albeit one I feared when I had to drive to an out-of-the-way indie theater in early 2011 to see Ed Helms’ seemingly mainstream Cedar Rapids. Yes, in 2024, this seemingly mainstream gal-pal comedy is being treated like a prestige platform release. The well-reviewed film, starring Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau, earned $171,321 over the weekend for a not-promising $14,227 per-theater average. The comedy, which NEON screened at SXSW and CinemaCon, will hopefully expand over the coming weeks. This would have been a run-of-the-mill programmer with halfway-decent commercial prospects even a decade ago. The Blue Angels earned $1.3 million in 227 Imax auditoriums. A 45-minute version for Imax institutional locales will follow this feature-length version for multiplexes.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes earned $26 million (-55%) in weekend two, pushing itself over the $100 million mark in North America and holding better than War for the Planet of the Apes (-63% from a $54 million debut in 2017). With $67 million worldwide this weekend for a $238 million global cume, it’s looking like around $155 million domestic (past the unadjusted $147 million cume for the 2017 flick) and around $380 million worldwide on a $160 million budget. War for the Planet of the Apes earned $491 million on a $190 million budget in 2017. However, that included a now-implausible $112 million from China where the new film has earned $20 million in ten days. Even $400 million global would be 2.5x the budget, meaning it will arguably be a situational hit.

The Fall Guy earned $8.5 million (-38%, a decent hold) on the weekend three for $63 million domestic in 17 days. The film will arrive on PVOD this Tuesday, but that isn’t a “break glass in case of emergency” move. As folks should know by now, almost every Comcast flick opening below $50 million goes to PVOD ($20 to rent) on the first Tuesday after day 17 in theaters. This is how it’s been for 3.5 years, yet every time folks argue that A) this is a situational development or B) it will cannibalize theatrical earnings. Thus far, this is not the case. Films that perform well in theaters (like Zendaya’s Challengers, which earned $2.9 million, dropping 33% in weekend four for a $43.5 million domestic/$78.7 million worldwide cume) continue to do so after PVOD availability.

The Ryan Gosling/Emily Blunt-led action comedy has earned $127 million worldwide, including a $900,000 debut in China this weekend. The $125 million David Leitch-directed flick should tap out with around $160 million. Yes, it deserved better, and yes, I blame audiences for not showing up to the very thing they claim they wanted, but there’s a reason I was down on the film after its $27.7 million domestic debut. The overseas grosses were already soft, and the math spoke for itself. Movies like The Fall Guy didn’t start flopping because Universal began to put them onto PVOD after 2.5 weeks in theaters. Universal started putting their films onto PVOD 19 days after release because films like The Fall Guy have been underperforming since 2016. Once again, say it with me now: we get the industry we deserve.

Courtesy of The Numbers…