‘Smile 2’ grinning to No. 1 at box office

AP:

Horror movies topped the domestic box office charts and an Oscar contender got off to a sparkling start this weekend. Smile 2, in its first weekend, and Terrifier 3, in its second, proved to be the big draws for general movie audiences in North America, while the Palme d’Or winner Anora got the best per-theatre average in over a year.

Smile 2 was the big newcomer, taking first place with a better-than-expected $23 million, according to studio estimates on Sunday. Parker Finn returned to write and direct the sequel to the supernatural horror, Smile, his début. Originally intended for streaming, Paramount pivoted and sent the movie to theatres in the fall of 2022 and it became a sleeper hit at the box office, earning some $217 million against a $17-million budget.

Theatrical commitment

The sequel, starring Naomi Scott as a pop star, was rewarded with a bit of a bigger budget, and a theatrical commitment from the start. Playing on 3,619 screens, it opened slightly higher than the first’s $22 million.

Second place went to Universal and DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot in its fourth weekend with $10.1 million, bumping it past $100 million in North America. Family films often have long lives in theatres, particularly ones as well reviewed as The Wild Robot, and some have speculated that it got a bump this weekend from teenagers buying tickets for the PG-rated family film and then sneaking into Terrifier 3, which is not rated, instead. Either way, Damien Leone’s demon clown movie, which cost only $2 million to produce, is doing more than fine with legitimate ticket buyers.

“Rumours like that are PR gold,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “There’s no better indication that that movie is red-hot right now.”

The No. 1 openings for Smile 2 this weekend and Terrifier 3 last were only possible because of the failure of Joker: Folie à Deu x. That big-budget sequel continued its death march in its third weekend, falling another 69 per cent to earn $2.2 million, bringing its domestic total to $56.4 million.

Warner Bros has a better performer in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which placed fourth in its seventh weekend with an additional $5 million, bringing its domestic total to $284 million. Rounding out the top five was the romantic tearjerker We Live In Time, which expanded to 985 theatres following last weekend’s début on five screens.

One of the other brightest spots of the weekend was Sean Baker’s Anora, which opened in six locations in New York and Los Angeles and earned an estimated $630,000.

Next weekend will have a major studio comic book movie with Venom: The Last Dance, as well as an awards movie in the papal thriller Conclave vying for audience attention.