Box Office Report for the Week of November 15

It has not been the best week for David Ellison‘s Skydance. After controversially letting go of DC Studios bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran and replacing them with Jeremy Latcham, the company’s stock plummeted, and its market value fell by at least $5.6 billion. Moreover, the combined studio’s social media pages are flooded by comic book fans who are asking to #ReloadTheGunn, a petition began to rehire the two bosses, which has so far amassed more than 240,000 signatures, and fans have been far more vocal about their dismissal than Zack Snyder‘s.

The studio also released a film, Ebenezer, starring Johnny Depp in his first major role since 2018’s Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, and it isn’t performing well. Never mind Ellison’s tweet congratulating everyone at Paramount for making it the “#1 movie in the world,” the film, with a broader rating than DC Studios’ Clayface and a similar budget, opened at a relatively unimpressive $19 million.

Johnny Depp used to open films at over $100 million. As much as its rabid fanbase would like you to believe how massive a star he was in his heyday (which was absolutely true when the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy was first released), Depp quickly became box office (and critical) poison in the 2010s, starring in a series of duds that eventually derailed his career before any legal troubles he encountered in his marriage with Amber Heard. This is context many covering the box office fail to ignore.

A film touted as the “grand comeback” of an actor who hasn’t necessarily captured the zeitgeist in the past decade (his last Pirates film bombed spectacularly), opening at $19 million, when it was projected to do so much more, is not the win Skydance believes it is. And they desperately need a series of provable hits to pay off their ridiculous $80 billion debt. With the stock not delivering the “tremendous value to shareholders” touted by Warner Bros.’ previous CEO, David Zaslav, Skydance is already in massive trouble…and they’re just getting started.

As far as the other new releases of the weekend, William Eubank’s Ghost Soldier, which also stars another problematic actor, Jim Caviezel, opened higher than David Leitch’s star-studded blockbuster How to Rob a Bank. The former raked in a modest $5.2 million this weekend, while the latter opened at seventh with $5.1 million, one of Amazon MGM Studios’ biggest bombs since the formation of its theatrical arm.

Next week will be an interesting one to analyze. Of course, The Hunger Games is back on the big screen and could hit big, but there’s one small problem: Grand Theft Auto VI is coming out. This is the gaming event of a generation, and it could disrupt the global economy come Thursday. Don’t believe me? How many people “called in sick” in 2013 when the fifth game came out? Yeah…

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

1. Ebenezer (Paramount): $19.0M – 3,535 theatres
2. The Cat in the Hat (Warner Bros. Animation): $11.4M (-43%) – 4,003 theatres
3. Godzilla Minus Zero (GKIDS): $8.3M (-73%) – 3,246 theatres
4. Ramayana: Rise of a Legend (Sony): $5.5M (-39%) – 1,110 theatres
5. You Can See Everything (A24): $5.4M (-35%) – 1,845 theatres
6. Ghost Soldier (Columbia Pictures): $5.2M – 2,558 theatres
7. How to Rob a Bank (Amazon MGM Studios): $5.1M – 2,810 theatres
8. Wild Horse Nine (Searchlight Pictures): $4.6M (-22%) – 2,175 theatres
9. Wildwood (LAIKA): $4.3M (-40%) – 2,163 theatres
10. Clayface (DC Studios): $3.7M (-45%) – 2,284 theatres

Source: Box Office Mojo