'Doctor Sleep' Is Yet Another Box-Office Bomb
by EG
The adaptation of Stephen King's novel Doctor Sleep was supposed to win the weekend box-office race. It didn't. The horror film performed much worse than expected and took second place to the war action movie Midway. The weekend didn't have good news for Midway, either, though; despite taking the top spot, the movie offered a meager return on its big budget. Read on for details.
Veterans Day weekend was a washout at the North American box office as an army of new movies disappointed.
Roland Emmerich’s pricey World War II epic Midway may have topped the chart with a better-than-expected $17.5 million from 4,086 theaters in a surprise upset over the horror-thriller Doctor Sleep, but it was somewhat of a hollow victory considering Midway's $100 million budget (luckily, U.S. and U.K. distributor Lionsgate carved out a deal that will leave the studio in the black).
Warner Bros.' Doctor Sleep — a sequel to The Shining — had been expected to easily win the weekend with $25 million or more. Instead, the Stephen King adaptation debuted to a drowsy $14.1 million domestically from 3,855 locations. It is also faring poorly overseas, where it earned $13.1 million from 68 markets for a foreign tally of $20 million and a global cume of $34.1 million.
A big chunk of frequent moviegoers aren’t well-versed in the mythology of The Shining, which opened in theaters 39 years ago, and felt no urgency to see the R-rated follow-up, which cost north of $50 million to produce and stars Ewan McGregor as a grown-up Danny Torrance. There also was the issue of Doctor Sleep's running time of roughly 151 minutes, and a post-Halloween release.
Midway, which chronicles the famous WWII battle in the Pacific between American and Japanese forces, is billed as one of the most expensive indie projects ever made. The film is produced by Emmerich's company Centropolis and financed by Chinese money and foreign sales arranged by AGC International.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.
Did you see a new movie this weekend? Let us know which one in the comments below.