‘Halloween Ends’ Tops Box Office With Strong $20.21 Million Friday

Universal and Blumhouse’s Halloween Ends easily topped the domestic box office on Friday with a solid $20.21 million. That’s reasonably on par with the $22.8 million Friday gross for Halloween Kills and positions the Jamie Lee Curtis/ Andi Matichak/Rohan Campbell slasher for an over/under $43 million opening weekend. Again, that compares just fine with the $49 million launch of Halloween Kills last October. The threequel was always going to be more frontloaded and open smaller than its immediate predecessor and the pie-in-the-sky Halloween ($77 million from a $33 million Friday). We’re talking about a trilogy that cost a combined $63 million, whose first installment grossed $256 million worldwide. The next two were pure gravy.

The reviews are slightly better for this installment (45% and 5.3/10 on Rotten Tomatoes versus 38% and 5/10 for Halloween Kills) and the C+ Cinemascore grade is on par with Halloween Kills’ B-. Back in my day, nobody expected The Babysitter Killer Strikes for the 12th Time! to get good reviews. This threequel, picking up four years after Halloween Kills, is more of an epilogue to the Laurie Strode/Michael Myers saga. I appreciated its leftfield turns and (especially for the first act) its existence as very much a Halloween film from the guy who directed All the Real Girls and Snow Angels. My wife and two oldest kids were very much among the 55% ‘rotten’ crowd. Losers…

The 2018 legacy sequel had decent reviews and oodles of free press. You had Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode returning to fight back, never mind that Halloween H20 did the same trick. You had the film’s ‘girls get it done’ finale (a heavily reshot climax), which was sold as implicitly or explicitly tied to the notion of generational trauma and the #metoo movement. However valid or invalid those readings were, it made for excellent copy and helped made the film a multigenerational nostalgia event. The following two films, with conventionally lousy reviews and far less buzz, were always going to lose the ‘folks were just curious the first time’ audience. That they still are opening this high is frankly impressive.

A $43 million debut would be behind only Jordan Peele’s Nope ($44 million) and David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills ($49 million) among R-rated openings since Bad Boys For Life. This argues for the notion that day-and-date, at least for Peacock (a service less associated with their parent company than Disney+), isn’t overtly affecting theatrical for a film audiences want to see. Maze Runner: The Death Cure ($24 million in 2018) and Fifty Shades Freed ($38 million in 2018) opened with around 80% of their respective predecessors’ debut weekends. That Halloween Ends will open to about 87% of Halloween Kills’ debut is a sign that what happened happened and couldn’t have happened any other way.

The only other major opener was the platform debut of United Artists’ Till. The well-reviewed and Oscar-buzzy (especially for Danielle Deadwyler) historical drama concerns the infamous murder of Emmitt Till, whose slaying (and much-publicized open-casket funeral) was one of the galvanizing moments of the Civil Rights movement. The Chinonye Chukwu-directed drama earned $97,000 in 16 theaters on Friday. That sets the stage for an over/under $245,000 opening weekend and $15,300 per-theater average. It’ll expand next weekend before going wide (alongside Tar) on October 28. Speaking of which, Cate Blanchett’s conductor drama expanded to 32 theaters. The Focus Features release will earn around $360,000 (+127%) this weekend for a $10,000 per-theater average and $585,000 ten-day total.