Weekend Box Office: 'Pushpa 2' And 'Interstellar' Top A Dozen Newbies as 'Lord of the Rings' Toon Nabs $2M Overseas
There were over a dozen small-scale domestic new releases as everyone wanted to be the next 'Godzilla: Minus One'. Tollywood's 'Pushpa 2' and Chris Nolan's 'Interstellar' came the closest by default.
Disney is not reporting domestic grosses for the 82-theater debut of Amy Adams’ Nightbitch. It’s officially an awards-qualifying theatrical exhibition like they did earlier this year with Daisy Ridley’s initially Disney+ bound The Young Woman and the Sea. I’m… not surprised to see almost none of the folks who wanted to storm Warner Bros Discovery’s offices with torches and pitchforks over a near-identical treatment for Clint Eastwood’s Juror No. 2 are as vocally perturbed over this one. Eastwood is a famous dude while Marielle Heller is a non-famous non-dude. Moreover, Disney often gets away with stuff — like removing original films and shows from their respective streaming sites — that gets WBD torched online. Meanwhile, it’s easier to use Juror No. 2 as an excuse to bag on David Zaslav than it is to use Nightbitch to “slam” Bob Iger.
Clint Eastwood’s legal melodrama and Marielle Heller’s maternity passion play (review) are both rock-solid studio releases. Once upon a time, when adults showed up in theaters in commercially viable numbers for adult-skewing, non-franchise, star+concept programmers, neither film would have had to be a “best of the year” contender to break through the noise. But I digress. Meanwhile, there are over a dozen new releases this weekend, not even counting Nightbitch. The lack of major studio offerings in the post-Thanksgiving slot gave the likes of Godzilla: Minus One and Renaissance: A Film by Beyonce a chance to break out accordingly. Now it seems that everyone is trying that. And I mean everyone… almost every sub-genre of “demographically specific event film” got their turn at bat. Fittingly enough, the top-earning newbies were Tollywood’s Pushpa: The Rule - Part 2 and the tenth-anniversary reissue of Chris Nolan’s Interstellar.