‘Don’t Worry Darling’ And ‘Avatar’ Both Earn $30 Million Global

Warner Bros. and New Line’s Don’t Worry Darling (review) opened atop the domestic box office this weekend with $19.2 million. That’s a decent figure for a $35 million R-rated, adult-skewing, star-driven original. It’s right between A Simple Favor ($16 million in 2018) and The Girl on the Train ($24 million in 2016). However, it also earned a lousy 2.04x weekend multiplier. Along with the mixed-negative reviews and a B- from Cinemascore, this does not paint the rosiest of pictures for the film’s post-debut legs. However, for now, the Olivia Wilde-directed and Florence Pugh-starring erotic fantasy thriller opened with exactly the over/under $20 million it would have with or without the months of tabloid gossip. Opening weekend is about marketing and pre-release interest, everything that happens next is about whether audiences liked the movie.

I’m old enough to remember when major studio, big-budget ‘women getting gaslit’ thrillers like Flight Plan and The Forgotten would notch $20-$25 million openings as a matter of course. The opening is decent, but it’s not superlative. It’s also yet more evidence that online-centric controversies make little-to-no impact on real-world behavior. The real world giggled and shrugged at allegations that Pugh and Wilde came to verbal blows on set, laughed at the false notion that Harry Styles spit on Chris Pine at the film’s Venice premiere and tisk-tisked the notion that Wilde claimed to have fired Shia LaBeouf to ‘protect’ her female lead from the famously troubled actor only for the actor to reply with video footage of her begging him to stay. But the film opened about as well as it always would have.

Pugh gives a stellar performance and Wilde pulls a ‘look what I can do’ flex. Styles is a better pick than LeBeouf for spoiler-specific reasons. The sideshow didn’t impact the movie, and audiences didn’t care beyond devilish curiosity. In the end, Don’t Worry Darling opened decently because it had four of the five key elements for a viable studio programmer. It had lousy reviews but did offer an all-star cast, a marquee director, an easy-to-pitch high concept (‘Stepford Wives meets Truman Show meets Get Out’) and the promise of cinematic escapism. Its trailers played before demographically friendly hits like Elvis, Where the Crawdads Sing and Nope. Even the critical pans assured audiences that it was full of glossy production value and hot movie stars being hot. The gossip didn’t help, but it certainly didn’t hurt.

It’s another example of Warner Bros. being very good at selling less-than-conventional theatricals into big or bigger-than-expected hits. Think, offhand, Magic Mike, Gravity, The LEGO Movie, American Sniper, the Conjuring franchise, It, Crazy Rich Asians, A Star Is Born, Joker, Dune and Elvis. We’ll see if the B- Cinemascore grade (although an A- from those under 18) is skewed, horror films tend to poll weirdly since the too-scary and the not-scary-enough crowds bring the scores down, or a truthful assessment of word-of-mouth. We’ll see if the opening was partially about Harry Styles being an actual butts-in-seats movie star (alongside Lady Gaga, natch) and whether general audiences still care about an all-too-rare major theatrical for/from/about women (it played 66% female). It’s still a $35 million flick (including Covid-related upcharges) that has earned $30 million worldwide thus far.

The only other newbie was James Cameron’s Avatar, which returned to theaters in a remastered-in-4k (and partially at 48-frames-per-second) and again disproved the notion that nobody cares about Avatar. The reissue earned $10 million domestic to bring its domestic cume to $770 million and counting. This is the most successful rerelease since the $18 million opening of Jurassic Park 3-D in early 2013, and it’s doing its job in terms of promoting Avatar: The Way of Water. I caught a showing with my two younger kids (both of whom are fans) at the Universal CityWalk IMAX. Here’s my hot take: While it’s better in 3-D on a giant IMAX screen, the film is so good and so well-crafted that honestly there was only a little value-uptick in terms of seeing it again under the best possible conditions.

As noted yesterday, whatever thoughts I had in December of 2014 about Avatar not having much of a conventional pop culture footprint, A) that’s no longer true and B) the very things it didn’t have (multimedia spin-offs, merchandise, obsessive online fans, etc.) now make the film’s initial success even more aspirational. It was one last original mega-blockbuster before IP and nostalgia became the driving force for theatrical tentpoles, so it now inspires nostalgia for a less nostalgic time. It helps that the film still kicks butt, and its ‘filmmaking brilliance > quotable dialogue’ sensibility now makes it even more valuable when so many big movies seem written and staged for the meme or the gif. With $30.5 million worldwide, including $6 million in IMAX, it was the biggest global grosser this weekend, bringing its cume to $2.877 billion.