New Releases Bomb As ‘Scream’ Passes $50 Million

The weekend box office news outside of Spider-Man: No Way Home is, well, it’s not great. For reasons related to either fear of Covid or a desire to advertise during next month’s Super Bowl, this weekend and next weekend are entirely free of “big” newbies. Right now, the biggest “threat” to theatrical moviegoing isn’t Covid but the sheer lack of regular tentpole or even mid-sized theatrical releases as Hollywood continues to chase a tech company whose stock arbitrarily dropped 20% last week. Anyway, moving on… 

Universal’s faith-based drama Redeeming Love earned $3.71 million over its debut weekend. The Nthibah Pictures/Mission Pictures/Pinnacle Peak Pictures production concerns a young woman coping with having been sold into prostitution as a child and stars Abigail Cowen and Tom Lewis. Of note, it’s directed by D.J. Caruso who made his name with star-driven programmers like Eagle Eye and Disturbia back when there was a market for such things. It’s no secret that I quite enjoyed his xXx: Return of Xander Cage (the rare Hollywood biggie to mostly bomb outside of China but do so damn well in China as to become a hit), so I’m hopeful the perpetually “in development” xXx 4 comes to fruition.  

Gravitas finally unleashed The King’s Daughter, which was shot eight years ago, into 2,170 theaters. Starring Pierce Brosnan, Kaya Scodelario and Benjamin Walker (the latter two have since married and had two kids), the film is based on Vonda N. McIntyre’s 1997 novel The Moon and the Sun, which (amusingly in retrospect) won the Nebula Award for Best Novel that year besting George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. The film was shot way in 2014 with the initial intent of Paramount releasing it on April 10, 2015. The King’s Daughter, about a daughter of royalty who forms a special bond with a mermaid which her father has kidnapped to achieve immortality, is “just a movie.”  

It’s not excessively good, but nor does it do anything more egregious that merely exist as a singular 97-minute one-and-done story. The $40 million budget is on the screen, even with some dubious special effects work concerning Fan Bingbing’s magical mermaid, and it’s a relic of a time when Hollywood thought they could conquer China and before studio programmers got wiped off the theatrical map by the streaming boom. Granted, it wouldn’t have been a hit even in early 2015, but its $568,000 weekend seems right for 2022. Warts and all, I again note that we can’t complain that Hollywood never releases anything new/different and then preemptively snark-to-death any new-to-you movie with a slightly unconventional premise.  

Scream recovered a bit after a sharp 71% Friday drop, earning $12.4 million in weekend two. Its 59% weekend drop is right in line with Scream 2 (-57% against Titanic and Tomorrow Never Dies), Scream 3 (-53% against just Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Beach) and Scream 4 (-62% after a lousy $18 million debut weekend). The R-rated slasher sequel has earned $51 million domestic, or more than double its $24 million budget. It pulled a better post-MLK weekend hold than Ride Along 2 (-64%) with a slightly sharper drop than Mama (-54%). We’re probably looking at a $75-$80 million domestic cume, which is arguably good enough to justify a Scream 6 if the budget is again kept in check. 

In holdover news, Sing 2 continues to Tomorrow Never Dies-it with $5.71 million (-28%) despite being concurrently available on PVOD. The $85 million jukebox musical sequel has earned $128.4 million domestic and $242 million worldwide. It has passed both Encanto ($215 million) and The Croods: A New Age ($227 million) to become the biggest pandemic-era toon. In terms of franchise holds, it has already held better compared to Sing ($271 million in 2016) than did The Secret Life of Pets 2 (from $368 million in 2016 to $160 million in 2019) domestically. Given the circumstances; an eventual $140 million domestic cume is about what I would have expected from Sing 2 in non-Covid times. 

The King’s Man, arriving on Hulu on February 18, has been quite leggy over the last month, dropping just 22% in weekend five for a $1.73 million gross. The raw numbers ($31 million domestic and $105 million worldwide) are terrible, but at least Disney’s 20th Century theatrical holdovers are stick around accordingly. West Side Story earned $690,000 (-26%) in weekend seven for a $35 million domestic cume and current 3.35x weekend-to-final multiplier. Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch has earned $16.1 million domestic or more than double the $7.058 million cume of alleged “crowd-pleasing Oscar season frontrunner Belfast.” With $213.48 million, Sony’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage should eventually crawl past Venom’s $213.5 million domestic cume.