Friday Box Office - 'Trap' Earns Soft $6.7 Million While 'Purple Crayon' Bombs, Plus Why 'Twisters' Is Struggling Overseas

Neon's 'Longlegs' is catching up to A24's 'Everything, Everywhere All At Once,' while 'Harold and the Purple Crayon' is an old-school box office disaster.

In Friday’s box office news that isn’t about Deadpool & Wolverine, M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap opened with a frankly underwhelming $6.7 million. That suggests an opening weekend closer to $16 million, which would be closer to Old ($16.8 million in the COVID summer of 2021) or Knock at the Cabin ($14.1 million in early 2023) than the $25 million debut of The Visit in late 2015 let alone the $40 million launch of Split in early 2017. The hope was that strong buzz and a youth-skewing hook (it’s about a doting dad/secret serial killer who takes his daughter to a pop concert only to realize that the show is also a dragnet to catch him) along with some generational Josh Hartnett nostalgia along with Shyamalan’s still viable marquee value would push this one to be a late-summer sleeper.

Alas, that isn’t happening. The Warner Bros. Discovery release earned mixed reviews (46% on Rotten Tomatoes and 53 on Metacritic), which was less noteworthy than WBD’s decision not to screen the over/under $30 million thriller for critics before release. Whether due to WBD expecting an even worse reception, wrongheaded concern about critics divulging “spoilers” (there’s quite a bit of “movie” that’s not even hinted at in the marketing, but professional journalists aren’t the ones who tend to spoil plot twists for sport) or Shyamalan himself feeling grumpy after we critics trashed Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers this past June (her episodes of Apple’s Servent were better), the lack of pre-release reviews didn’t exactly create a perception of artistic triumph. Moreover, as frankly feared, nobody offline cared in the 2000s or cares in the 2020s about Hartnett.

WBD’s summer of Shyamalan could be 0/2.

I liked it, warts and all, but audiences gave it a C+. Yes, it’s a horror film, and horror movies tend to poll lower (some audiences think it’s not scary enough while others declare that it’s too frightening or uncomfortable). But that’s still not great for what was very much not a grimdark A24 tone poem or hardcore grindhouse endurance test. It would seem that WBD’s summer of Shyamalan is not shaping up any better than (personal critical opinions notwithstanding) Lionsgate’s “summer of Samuel L. Jackson” (Spiral, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard and The Protege) in 2021. Like every Shyamalan flick since The Visit in 2015, Trap is at least partially self-financed, and this was his first flick since moving from Universal to Warner Bros. Discovery. We’ll see if it can justify itself commercially over the long haul.

Sony’s poorly reviewed and indifferently received Harold and the Purple Crayon is a sequel to Crocket Johnson’s original book. Zachary Levi plays the grown-up version of the book’s youthful protagonist, but this is not the second coming of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland or Steven Spielberg’s Hook. The $40 million flick, directed by Blue Sky Animation vet Carlos Saldanha, earned $2.4 million on Friday for an over/under $6 million opening weekend. I have yet to see it, but the poor reviews are not a shock (it didn’t look like a new classic) and a disappointment as Peter Rabbit and Lyle Lyle Crocodile were much better than expected. If It Ends with Us opens anywhere near the optimistic projections, this will be a minor miss in what’s still a pretty solid summer for Sony.