Friday Box Office: 'Final Destination 6' Tops With $21M As 'Sinners' And 'New Avengers' Both Pass $300M Global
With a mere $2.5 million opening day for Lionsgate’s ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow,’ it appears that very everybody was *not*, in fact, working for The Weekend.
Warner Bros. Discovery and New Line Cinema’s Final Destination: Bloodlines topped the domestic box office on Friday with a $21 million opening day. That’s nearly double The Final Destination’s $10.8 million 3-D enhanced opening day in August 2009. With a 92% fresh with a 7.2/10 on Rotten Tomatoes, even if some of that is — like Saw X — the kids who grew up on the series now being the adults in the room, and perfectly solid B+ from CinemaScore, we can expect a $45-$55 million opening weekend. For reference, The Final Destination opened with $27.4 million in its domestic Fri-Sun debut, which would be $41 million adjusted for inflation. So, yeah, Final Destination is back and bigger than ever.
Heck, not accounting for inflation, the five previous installments’ domestic totals were $53 million in 2000, $47 million in 2003, $54 million in 2006, $66 million in 2009 and $43 million in 2011. So, yeah, this one will open on par with the domestic cumes of most of its predecessors. Okay, in this case, “IP for IP’s sake” might have worked. That’s good news for a summer packed with nostalgia-chasing revivals like Karate Kid: Legends, 28 Years Later, The Smurfs Movie, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Naked Gun and Freakier Friday. However, the Final Destination franchise is entirely concept-driven, and this latest installment mostly avoids character-specific nostalgia and memberbery-continiuty-callbacks.
The concept is simple to explain and appealing to those too young to remember when a high schooler having an onboard “the plane… it’s gonna crash!” meltdown wouldn’t be sent straight to a holding cell. WBD emphasized not the lore but the impressive past-tense epilogue, which is easily Final Destination 6’s most “worth it in IMAX” sequence. This marks Warner Bros. Discovery’s third straight overperformer since early April. It’s a “success breeds success” story, as nearly everyone who showed up for Sinners has seen the Bloodlines trailer. It’s also another “theatrical IP belongs in theaters, dammit” data point. This sixth installment was — like 2023’s $145 million worldwide-grossing Evil Dead Rise — initially greenlit as an HBO Max flick.