by Conan Simmons – October 26, 2020 – 5:45 pm
The weekend box office numbers are in and Liam Neeson’s ‘Honest Thief’ holds on to the number one spot for a second weekend. Taking in a mere $2.4 million it is the lowest take for a number one film over a weekend since On Genre started tracking the numbers as theaters started reopening.
Colder weather is arriving briskly and the Coronavirus pandemic is doing its usual disrupting of everyday life around the world. Many countries are reverting back to Covid-19 restrictions, mostly lockdowns that are forcing theaters to close back down. The theaters that remain open in the U.S. are frustratingly struggling for product from a Hollywood that keeps pushing back release dates for its most in demand films.
WEEKEND BOX OFFICE TOP 5 (October 23-25, 2020)
- ‘Honest Thief’ – $2.4 million – action adventure crime (drop of 1.3 mil, 35% decline)
- ‘The War with Grandpa’ – $1.9 million – family film (drop of 600k, 24% decline)
- ‘Tenet’ – $1.3 million – science-fiction (drop of 300k, 19% decline)
- ‘The Empty Man’ – $1.3 million – horror (debut)
- ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ – $500k – animated (drop of 800k, 62% decline)
Total weekend box office is $7.4 million. Dropping 2.4 million, or 25% from last weekend’s 9.8 million. Even with these low numbers the total box office is higher than the first two weekends of October.
The only new film to break into the Top 5 is the horror film ‘The Empty Man’ from Disney owned 20th Century. ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ is a rerelease of the 1993 animated film. ‘Tenet’ continues to stay in the Top 5 while making lower than hoped for returns here in the States. It did perform very well overseas making it the third highest grossing film of 2020 with $340 million, behind ‘Bad Boys For Life’ with $426 million and the war film from China ‘The Eight Hundred’, about the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, with $460 million. China’s theaters are remaining open as their domestic films dominate the box office of the Middle Kingdom.