With October come and gone, there’s not much new going on other than Amazon Studios’ limited release of Suspiria, which shifted from only two theaters last weekend into 311 this time around. It’s unclear just how wide it will go next weekend (Amazon has not returned my inquiries), but last weekend it made an insane $89,003 per screen average in just two theaters in New York and Los Angeles. However, this weekend, the PER was $3,102 for a $964,000 weekend. While I am pretty good at breaking box office down, I have no clue how to look at these numbers. It doesn’t have quite the same hype as Hereditary and I’m not sure it’s going to roll into stronger weekends going forward. The budget is reportedly a massive $20M and it’s unclear how much Amazon spent marketing the film. It looks bad purely based on the budget, but let’s see how the next few weeks shake out and also be cognizant of the fact that Amazon has the ability to sell this worldwide and also doesn’t have to pay to acquire this film for release on their streaming service (Netflix spent $60M just for The Cloverfield Paradox). In fact, for all we know, this limited release is just a play for an Oscar run later this year/early next.
As for Universal Pictures’ Halloween, the slasher sequel has now topped $225M worldwide (it sits at $229M globally) after adding another $11M this weekend for a $150M domestic total. As previously reported, this is the largest film in the franchise. Also, contrary to reports, after adjusting for inflation, Halloween is not bigger than Scream (yet). No matter, a sequel is guaranteed.
Looking in on Columbia Pictures’ Venom, it added another $7.8M domestic and is just about to pass $200M. Globally, it’s approaching $550M with it opening in China next weekend. Carnage, here we come.
