Box Office Weekend – ‘House’ Clocks In With $26M+ Opening
In a pretty quiet weekend at the box office, The House with a Clock in Its Walls rang loudly while other new releases stumbled and holdovers that weren’t The Predator had decent holds.
The House with a Clock in Its Walls was expected to have an opening only slightly above $20M and it managed to break out with families instead, earning close to $27M. For a $42M-budgeted film, that’s a good start, and it’s a personal best for director Eli Roth (perhaps unsurprisingly, considering that his previous offerings were hard-R horror gore-fests that only appealed to a specific niche). But fellow new releases weren’t so lucky, as political documentary Fahrenheit 11/9 and the tearjerker Life Itself made roughly half of what they were expected to do, contributing to one of this year’s weakest weekends at the box office. (Things should pick up in about two weeks with A Star is Born and Venom kicking off the Autumn season.)
As for holdovers, the worst news was reserved for Fox’s The Predator, which dropped nearly 65% – bad news for anyone hoping that the movie would have legs. On the bright side, it’s currently outpacing 2010’s Predators, which ended its run with $52M (albeit against a smaller budget). For everything else, things were pretty peachy: all remaining releases dropped under 50%, with movies targeting female demographics like A Simple Favor and Crazy Rich Asians seeing some of the smallest drops of the weekend frame. Sure, this weekend is one of the smallest of the year, but that doesn’t mean that smaller movies didn’t at least get some tickets sold at the box office.
The Top Twelve box office performances for the three-day weekend can be summarized as follows (bolded titles are new releases):
- The House with a Clock in Its Walls (Universal Pictures/Amblin Entertainment) – $26.85M Total.
- A Simple Favor (Lionsgate) – $10.4M Weekend/$32.562M Total; 35% Drop.
- The Nun (Warner Bros./New Line) – $10.25M Weekend/$100.895M Total; 43.8% Drop.
- The Predator (20th Century Fox) – $8.7M Weekend/$40.435M Total; 64.7% Drop.
- Crazy Rich Asians (Warner Bros.) – $6.515M Weekend/$159.439M Total; 25% Drop.
- White Boy Rick (Sony Pictures/Studio 8) – $5M Weekend/$17.41M Total; 43.6% Drop.
- Peppermint (STX Entertainment) – $3.72M Weekend/$30.332M Total; 38% Drop.
- Fahrenheit 11/9 (Briarcliff Entertainment) – $3.101M Total.
- The Meg (Warner Bros.) – $2.35M Weekend/$140.522M Total; 39.2% Drop.
- Searching (Sony Pictures/Screen Gems) – $2.175M Weekend/$23.115M Total; 31.6% Drop.
- Life Itself (Amazon Studios) – $2.106M Total.
- Unbroken: Path to Redemption (Pure Flix) – $1.335M Weekend/$4.59M Total; 40.4% Drop.
The Meg, Crazy Rich Asians, The Nun, and The Predator are now playing in theaters.
Grant Davis is a freelance writer who has covered entertainment news for more than seven years. His articles have frequently appeared in Star Wars News Net as well as as other entertainment-related websites. As someone who grew up on Star Wars and comic book movies, he’s completely thrilled with the current era of genre entertainment.
