Fourth weekend of October 2025

I thought we had enough gross coming in this weekend to counter the $51 million that Venom 3 brought in this weekend last year, but a couple of these films ended up with built in and self-inflicted issues (more on that below) that will keep the total a little behind last year. Next week it’s not even going to be close, but that’s because we’ve got a Friday Halloween next weekend, and traditionally that crushes the box-office, so it’s pretty much a two day weekend next week.

Right on cue last week, Variety ran a story about how One Battle After Another is going to lose $100+ million [https://variety.com/2025/film/box-office/one-battle-after-another-lose-100-million-dollars-theaters-1236552914/], and Deadline followed up with a similar piece on Tron Ares. And while those movies have different goals (as I’ve spoken about before, One Battle After Another is playing the awards game, and since that’s an iffy ROI proposition, P/L’s go out the window), there’s something going on this weekend where the idiot trade press will bury their heads in the sand and refuse to give similar treatment to.

Netflix is going wide with Frankenstein (it went exclusive at the Nuart last weekend), and you won’t hear a thing about it. The cost of the film is very similar to One Battle After Another, but even though the total North American gross this weekend on Frankenstein probably won’t outgross what the 3 Vista Vision prints did on One Battle After Another, once awards season kicks into gear those morons at the trades will be on their feet screaming ‘bravo Netflix, you’re so amazing. But WB with your $100 million + WW theatrical, eeewww, you suck.’ Same situation with Tron Ares; where was the similar article about the $300 million Netflix flushed down the toilet this last Spring on The Electric State?

But let me be clear, it’s Netflix’s money and if this is what they want to do, great, it’s creating a lot of jobs (mostly outside the US, but that’s another issue). My beef here is with the trades, and if they are going to write clickbait headlines that are mostly ‘glass half empty’ about studios that go true theatrical, they need to give similar treatment to Netflix. Of course, Netflix doesn’t report grosses (because the numbers suck are abysmal), and if they did the trades would be screaming ‘bomb!’ loud enough that TSA would show up at their offices. But what’s odd to me is that they do report some data now on platform viewership, and you never see articles about how these insanely expensive films they make for the platform get their ass kicked there by small rom coms, baking shows and movies that went theatrical. So the data is there, the press is too lazy (or dumb) to write about it.

Of course, even though Netflix doesn’t spend much money on whatever you want to call this ’Theatrical’ tier, they’ll back up the Brinks truck for the Awards campaign. But as I hear people tell me ‘you really need to see Frankenstein in a Theater’, their C-Suite keeps saying ‘we really want you to watch our films on TV’, so why would I bother going to a theater? And as I keep hearing them say that ‘you should watch this film on TV’, why again are they going for Oscars instead of Emmys? You would think a film as good as this film supposedly is, it would do very well in the Emmys. However, Netflix hasn’t had much more success lately in the Emmys than they have with the Oscars, so maybe losing to WB and Disney isn’t any more attractive than losing to A24 and Neon.

Anyway, with the same accuracy as the photos posted this week for the Westwood shoot for The Shards that had Blue Lagoon playing at the Village (it opened exclusive at The Dome and then played the Mann Westwood on Gayley, which is now Whole Foods), and The Shining was playing at the Bruin (it played at the Village), here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Regretting You - The maiden voyage for the new and improved Paramount* looks pretty good so far. However, there are probably some missed opportunities here that could have made this better. Back in the Summer of 2022, Colleen Hoover became a Theatrical IP savior when Where the Crawdads Sing opened to $17 million, although about 3/4 of that gross came from smaller markets in the South East where Crawdads actually sing. I talk here all the time about the ”+‘s” of combining IP’s and by adding some Star IP to Book IP, there’s a + factor; and adding anything Taylor Swift adjacent (in this case the face that launched a thousand lawsuits, Blake Lively, and a Tay Tay Song for the film) the + factor rocketed the gross on It Ends With Us to $50 million. So now we have some really solid IP to build on with Colleen Hoover’s IP, and if there was a book that needed a + in casting (this book was one of Colleen Hoover’s least selling books at only about 1 million copies), this was it. But that didn’t happen here.

Instead of Zhuzhing this up with a star or two to add some +, they went all Nepo here, and ended up with ‘who? and I don’t care about her’. When you have an IP where we’ve seen it break out with a + in casting, why are you casting actors that have an IMDB filmography that’s worse than Glen Powell’s parents? Maybe we need a casting Mendoza line [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendoza_Line] here and call it the GSC (Glen Sr/Cindy) line?

Because of the low wattage cast (and the same could be said about Crawdads) the grosses look very similar to Crawdads today; maybe a little behind but that’s fine because Crawdads was released in July and it should be better at this point in the day. So what we’re seeing is ‘base Colleen Hoover’ gross wise, and as they continue to make more of her books into movies, clearly spending some money on actor IP is the way to go. So far the grosses are best in the Southeast (but not quite as concentrated as they were on Crawdads), and the exit polls are pretty good here, so I don’t think this will burn out after today. Assuming it’s a weekend playout similar to Crawdads, figure this ends up in the low/mid teens.

Chainsaw Man - The Movie : Reze Arc - The roll in Sony/Cruchyroll juggernaut continues, and they had a great opening day yesterday. But just like all the other Anime movies, this looks very compartmentalized, and there’s virtually zero growth from hour to hour. As I continue to harp on how opening films on the worst night of the week hurts tagalongs, it would make sense to move a film like this to a Friday opening so we have a better shot at tagalongs. As with all the other Anime titles, the big question here is what it will do tomorrow.
Based on the delta tomorrow, it’s going to end up anywhere between $12 million and the mid teens.

Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere - A couple of weeks ago we watched The Smashing Machine struggle opening weekend, and the industry was a little shocked because we all thought (because Dwayne Johnson was starring in it) it was something like Creed. However, the moviegoing consumer saw it as The Wrestler and didn’t show up, but I wonder if that title positioned it with the industry to make us think it was closer to Creed.

Since Deliver Me From Nowhere is about battling depression and it’s not a jukebox music biopic, (from a Marketing point of view) Disney did their best to walk the line between what the film was and polished it up so it might be closer to a biopic, so the fans would show up. But there was an element to this film that tied their hands. Since the film is about Bruce Springsteen battling depression, and through that depression came the Nebraska album, using a lyric from a track on the album as the title (State Trooper, and the lyric was also the name of the book it was based on) just doesn’t work great as a theatrical proposition. You’ve got a film about depression and now you have a title that sounds depressing, soooo….why do I want to pay for that? Deliver Me From Nowhere works just fine for a book or for the lower purchase threshold of streaming, but as a theatrical proposition, it’s limiting to the really hard core Bruce fans.

We all get locked into things like ‘but it’s the name of the book’ and don’t consider a better way to position the film with a different title; but since we all know that Bruce is still around and thriving, there should have been a pivot here to change it from a movie about battling depression to a movie about battling through depression. Since the Nebraska album is a chronicle of his journey recreated in this movie, he actually built a song into that chronicle that talks about getting through the darkness. The last track on the album is called Reason to Believe, and a line that’s repeated several times in the chorus is ‘at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe’. If they would have pivoted to a title that gave Disney a chance of selling this as a ‘how to’ manual of getting through dark times, and instead of Reason to Believe which tells the consumer that after you see this you’re going to go down the the River and into the river we’ll dive (to kill yourself) to having a title that bi yi yi yi yi yi yi yi yi yi yinds them to buying a ticket to the theater, who knows how much better this would be today.

For a film about depression, the grosses today aren’t half bad and it’s clear Disney squeezed everything they could out of this. It’s obviously very regional and fan based (the Northeast), but it looks good enough to get to $10 million or $11 million.

Shelby Oaks - This found footage horror film from Neon went 1800 runs and outside of the artier LA/NY theaters, it’s not much. Figure about $2 million.

Begonia - Went exclusive in 6 markets (NY, LA, SF, Austin, Chicago, Boston) and for the most part it’s pretty good. The only market that looks a little softer than the rest is Boston, but this is a really good start. Figure a psa in the $40k to $50k range.

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