‘Smile’ brings horror to the top of the Weekend Box Office Top 5 just as October brings Halloween creeps into season.
The film stars Sosie Bacon as a therapist who experiences weirdness involving creepy smiling characters. Kal Penn, from Harold and Kumar fame, is also featured in the cast.
While ‘Smile’ overperformed expectations scaring up $22.6 million, the only other debut to break the Top 5 is the gay rom-com, ‘Bros’.
Starring comedian Billy Eichner, ‘Bros’ scored $4.8 million while making history as the first gay romantic comedy to be released by a major Hollywood studio. Universal released the film, produced by Judd Apatow and with Amanda Bearse (tv’s ‘Married with Children’ and horror classic ‘Fright Night’) in the cast.
Most box office pundits expected ‘Bros’ to make closer to $9 million. Though the film made about half of expectations, resulting in a box office bomb, the overall gross could have been worse.
While the studio and star Eichner rightly are pointing out that heterosexual audiences largely stayed away, the fact that advertising in general wasn’t too prominent also played a factor. The film likely would have made closer to $2 million if not for Billy Eichner’s relentless push through tv appearances and social media ultimately helping the film play somewhat outside of New York and California.
The middle of the Weekend Box Office Top 5 are holdovers from last week.
Olivia Wilde’s scandal plagued mystery ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ dropped a hard 65% in its sophomore weekend pulling in $6.8 million for the second spot.
Historical action film ‘The Woman King’, starring Viola Davis, was just barely behind for third.
The rerelease of James Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi flick ‘Avatar’ dropped 50% in its second weekend of release to take fourth place.
Overall, the Weekend Box Office Top 5 dropped a mere 2% from last week.
The box office won’t chang much in the coming weeks. Next weekend brings all-star mystery ‘Amsterdam’, featuring a cast of Margot Robbie, Robert De Niro, Christina Bale, Taylor Swift and many more. Tepid reviews may cap its box office to $20 million or less.
The following weekend brings ‘Halloween Ends’. The finale of the long running series (yeah, we’ve all heard that before) stars Jamie Lee Curtis as she once again duels the masked killer known as Michael Myers. Unfortunately, the film is slated for a day and date release to stream on Peacock. This will undoubtedly mute box office performance. The film should still perform well on its opening weekend as the franchise is as popular as pumpkin spice this time of year.
WEEKEND BOX OFFICE TOP 5 (September 30 – October 2, 2022)
- ‘Smile’ – $22.6 million – horror (debut)
- ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ – $6.8 million – mystery (drop $12.4 million, 65% down)
- ‘The Woman King’ – $6.8 million – historical (drop $4.3 million, 39% down)
- ‘Avatar’ – $5 million – science fiction (drop $5 million, 50% down)
- ‘Bros’ – $4.8 million – romantic comedy (debut)
Total for the Weekend Box Office Top 5 comes to $46.1 million. This is a drop of $900k, a 2% decrease, from last weekend’s total of $47 million.