Maxance Vincent
It’s been another slow weekend at the cinema, as many students around the world return to school once more, before the fall movie season begins in full swing next week with The Conjuring: Last Rites. As a result, Weapons has returned to the top spot of the box office this weekend, since Netflix only played KPop Demon Hunters for two days. The film snagged a $10.2 million tally at the domestic box office, putting its global score at $234.1 million.
Even better, Jaws, which was re-released in IMAX and several formats for its 50th anniversary, coinciding with the exact same weekend as its last cinema run, generated a considerable amount of revenue, with a $8.1 million tally. The word “timeless classic” is indeed the perfect descriptor for this movie, which continues to find new (or returning) moviegoers to enthrall.
As someone who saw the IMAX remaster in 2022, I opted for the new restoration of Prince: Sign ‘o’ the Times in the format, which was jaw-dropping, but Universal is extremely bullish on IMAX re-releases of classic movies. Next month, Apollo 13 is getting a prime remaster for its 30th anniversary, while Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future will also be released in the format on October 31. As someone who’s been saying, “How come IMAX has never re-released Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, and Back to the Future?” for years now, it’s about damn time. Hopefully, the next ones will follow suit soon enough.
As for the new movies released this weekend, Darren Aronofsky‘s Caught Stealing made a considerable $7.8 million, while Jay Roach‘s The Roses ended up in fifth place with a meager $6.3 million. Both of these films are relatively mid-budget, so they have a chance to gain traction before the fall movies begin to be released and the Awards season fully ramps up. With Venice and Telluride happening right now, alongside TIFF beginning in just a few days from now, we’ll have a clearer picture of who is best positioned to be the frontrunners as the next Best Picture contenders vie for attention at some of the most prestigious film festivals.
Stay tuned at Awards Radar for more updates on the season coming your way very soon!
Here is the full list of the top ten films of the weekend:
- Weapons (Warner Bros): $10.2M (-33.7%) – 3,416 theatres
- Jaws (Universal): $8.1M – 3,200 theatres
- Caught Stealing (Sony): $7.8M – 3,578 theatres
- Freakier Friday (Disney): $6.5M (-26.6%) – 3,475 theatres
- The Roses (Disney): $6.3M – 2,700 theatres
- The Fantastic Four: First Steps (Disney): $4.8M (-20.1%) – 2,785 theatres
- The Bad Guys 2 (Universal): $4.7M (-7.2%) – 3,024 theatres
- Superman (Warner Bros): $2.5M (-24.2%) – 1,824 theatres
- Nobody 2 (Universal): $1.83M (-50.6%) – 2,502 theatres
- The Naked Gun (Paramount): $1.8M (-39.7%) – 1,744 theatres
Source: Comscore
It’ll be interesting to see if American audiences are still interested in going to the theater to validate the make-believe stories from those two grifters. It was easy to pretend they weren’t shameless liars twelve years ago, since bullshit artists were considered mostly harmless in 2013… but a lot has changed since then.