Box Office Report for the Week of September 8

It’s showtime for the fall movie season, as festivals are in full effect before the main event, which is Awards season! Of course, TIFF is in full swing, with plenty of incredible movies screening for attendees, and we’ll undoubtedly have a bigger picture of how awards season will shape up very soon with the news that A24 recently acquired Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist. My gut feeling is that it won’t come out this year, and the studio will save it for next year, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong and that it goes all the way.

Meanwhile, the fall movie season is off to a great start, with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opening at an incredible $110 million at the domestic box office! It has not beaten the record set by Andy Muschietti‘s It as the biggest September opening, but it came close, as it is now the second highest-grossing opening for the month of all time!

It is also the second-biggest opening of 2024 and Tim Burton‘s second personal best, behind Alice in Wonderland’s $116 million. It also topped the entire worldwide cume of the 1988 original in one weekend, which totaled $74 million. Of course, the currency is not the same now, but it’s still very impressive to see how massive the Beetlejuice fanbase is. I love the movie, and it’s always been one of my childhood favorites, but I was never under the impression that it was one of Tim Burton’s most beloved films.

Most people have an affinity for The Nightmare Before Christmas, which he did not direct! Yet, when watching the news the other day, the journalist talked about how it’s Tim Burton’s masterpiece! It’s incredible how two seconds of Google will save you from secondhand embarrassment, but it’s interesting how many people think it’s Burton’s when Henry Selick directed it. It was when I sat down at the advanced IMAX screening of the movie when I realized the extent of the Beetlejuice fanbase, with many audience members either cosplayed as the Bio-Exorcist, or as Lydia Deetz.

Having realized this, it’s no surprise that the movie opened big and will likely be one of the highest-grossing productions of the fall. How big will it go? I don’t think it will go as big as Alice in Wonderland, but it will be one of Burton’s most commercially successful projects. For thirty-six years, audiences have been patiently waiting for a second go-around with Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse. In my opinion, the movie is endlessly rewatchable, and Burton did not disappoint. It might drop as big as we think, as the next few weeks will be crowded with some blockbusters, but not as big as this one.

It’s a great start for another season full of hopefully incredible theatrical events that will surround us with the magnifying power of the big screen again, awaiting magic that can’t be replicated in any other setting.

Here is the complete list of the top ten films of the weekend:

1. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Warner Bros.): $110M – 4,575 theatres
2. Deadpool & Wolverine (Disney): $7.2M (-53%) – 3,400 theatres
3. Reagan (Showbiz Direct Distribution): $5.2M (-32%) – 2,770 theatres
4. Alien: Romulus (Disney): $3.9M (-58%) – 2,560 theatres
5. It Ends with Us (Sony): $3.8M (-49%) – 2,850 theatres
6. The Forge (Sony): $2.9M (-36%) – 1,710 theatres
7. Twisters (Universal): $2.3M (-71%) – 2,252 theatres
8. Blink Twice (Amazon MGM Studios): $2.1M (-56%) – 1,806 theatres
9. The Greatest of All Time (Alerion): $2.0M – 530 theatres
10. Despicable Me 4 (Universal): $1.8M (-56%) – 1,919 theatres

Source: Comscore