Weekend Preview: A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE Aims to Unseat ...
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Pros
Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out 2 enters its third frame as the highest-grossing movie of 2024 with over $800M in global ticket sales. Domestically, the film is coming off its second consecutive $100M+ frame, becoming one of only 7 titles to cross $100M over its second weekend. It took the sequel less than two weeks to overpass Inside Out’s total domestic run ($356.5M), and is on pace to find itself past the $400M domestic benchmark before Friday. It may end up being a close race for the number one spot, but it’s current showtimes footprint narrowly edges Paramount’s A Quiet Place Day One. Inside Out 2 has the potential to hit $1.5 billion worldwide through its theatrical run. That would place the film along the lines of the memorable performance that Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick ($1.49 Billion) achieved in the summer of 2022.Cons
Despicable Me 4 shows every indication of cannibalizing the Inside Out 2 family demo starting Wednesday, July 3 domestically (it snatched $9.3M from only 4 international test territories last weekend). This is the last opportunity for the Pixar movie to strut its stuff at the top of the box office, and a #2 placement might kill any hope of momentum as it goes toe-to-toe with the Minions in the coming weeks. 2.. A Quiet Place: Day OneParamount | NewOpening Weekend Range: $50 – $55MThe Boxoffice Company’s Showtimes Dashboard Marketshare: 23%Pros
The first A Quiet Place was a sleeper hit when it launched in April 2018, with Paramount and Michael Bay’s horror shingle Platinum Dunes combining big stars (John Krasinski, Emily Blunt) with high-concept terror for a massive win. The second entry, which had Cillian Murphy mostly taking over as the male lead (director/star Krasinski returned to the helm and appeared via flashbacks), was intended to launch in March 2020 before the pandemic scuttled those plans. A premiere was even held on March 8 of that year in New York City, just before lockdowns were enacted. A year later, Paramount decided to forgo a streaming release for an exclusive 45-day theatrical window, which paid dividends as A Quiet Place Part II hit theaters just as the Covid-19 vaccine became widely available in the United States. The performance between the two titles was similar, here’s the box office snapshot for the pair…
A Quiet Place (2018) – $50M Opening / $188M Domestic / $340M WW A Quiet Place Part II (2021) – $47.5M Opening / $160M Domestic / $297M WWWith Krasinski deciding to helm Paramount’s IF instead of a third chapter, the studio decided to give us this weekend’s prequel A Quiet Place: Day One, which not only gives us new protagonists in Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o and Stranger Things breakout Joseph Quinn but a brand new venue (New York City instead of America’s heartland) for the sound-sensitive alien invaders to cause mayhem. While Krasinski co-penned the story, he handed the helm to Michael Sarnoski, who directed the critically acclaimed Nicolas Cage vehicle Pig. That’s a terrific pedigree to carry the torch for this franchise. If it succeeds, it can branch off in many perspectives and locales, like the similarly apocalyptic AMC series The Walking Dead. Reactions from early pressers have also been quite positive.
The studio expects a “strong opening,” and even if this new entry doesn’t live up to audience expectations, it should clean up nicely both at its 3,700 locations here and overseas. It opens in 59 markets this frame, including Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Mexico, Spain, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. This will easily become the highest-grossing horror title of the year, beating out The Strangers: Chapter 1‘s current $34.8M domestic cume.Cons
Changing out the leads (along with tossing the relatable middle-American backdrop for NYC) may alienate audiences who fell in love with the Abbott family of the previous two. Replacing the cast for a splashy prequel certainly didn’t help Furiosa light up the night sky. Then there’s the 2024 horror movie curse to reckon with, where many titles have underperformed significantly. 3. Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1Warner Bros. Pictures | NEWWeekend Range: $12 – $20MThe Boxoffice Company’s Showtimes Dashboard Marketshare: 8%Pros
This is the first of four planned movies in what is surely one of the most ambitious movie projects ever attempted, on a similar ambition scale as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy or Russia’s four-part War and Peace adaptation (1966-67). The gambit of not only making multiple films at once (Chapter 2 comes out August 16) but partially self-financing their massive production and marketing is a bold one for co-writer/producer/director/star Kevin Costner. Don’t count him out, though, since he’s coming off a spectacular run on the successful modern western show Yellowstone. That series not only kicked off a TV dynasty for Paramount+ but yielded an enormous financial windfall for him ($1.3M per episode by the time he left the show), enough to finance his dream western saga with $38 million of his own cash plus other investors and selling foreign rights. Our forecasting panel indicates that the film was tracking in the $10-$12M range in major metropolitan areas, while the middle part of the country was performing on pace to a performance closer to $20M. This is to be expected with this title, which is likely to feature a great deal of walkup business from the mostly older-skewing audiences that were charmed by Costner on Yellowstone, consistently making it one of the highest-rated streaming titles. The faith-based breakout Sound of Freedom performed similarly on a geographic level, over-indexing for a $19M debut and $184m domestic. Horizon probably won’t have the same legs, but a $20M ceiling and domestic run in the $60-$80M range would make sense based on early tracking data.Cons
Once the staple American action genre, the Western is no longer a genre built for tentpoles. Fewer and fewer examples open theatrically, while some of the most popular recent entries (The Power of the Dog, The Harder They Fall, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) were streaming exclusives. Here’s how five of the biggest theatrical westerns of the last half-decade performed domestically…
Hostiles (2017) – $22,849K opening/$29.8M cume The Sisters Brothers (2018) – $115,575K opening/$3.1M cume The Call of the Wild (2020) – $8M opening/$62.3M cume News of the World (2020) – $2.2M opening/$12.6M cume Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) – $23.2M/$68M cumeAll these titles boasted large budgets and big stars (Christian Bale, Joaquin Phoenix, Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, Leonardo DiCaprio) yet none performed well enough to warrant one sequel… let alone four movies.
Also keep in mind that Costner is decades past his box office heyday in the early 90’s when he churned out improbable hits from JFK to The Bodyguard to Best Picture winner Dances With Wolves. Besides Zack Snyder’s first two Superman movies—where his role as Pa Kent was minor—Costner’s biggest recent theatrical performer was 2016’s Hidden Figures ($169.6M), where he was the fourth lead and not even featured on the poster. For his highest-grossing headlining role of recent years, you have to go all the way back to his last directorial effort, 2003’s Open Range ($58.3M). Corner is, unfortunately, no stranger to bloated vanity projects that have missed audiences (see the 1997 bomb The Postman), and a current 47% critical on Rotten Tomatoes for Horizon is not a good sign.Boxoffice Pro is the world’s leading reference in box office forecasts and reports, reaching 98% of decision-makers in theatrical exhibition.
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