'Don't Worry Darling' Has a Decent Opening Weekend
by EG
The much-talked-about thriller Don't Worry Darling finally hit theaters over the weekend, and it delievered a respectable debut in terms of ticket sales and took the top spot for the week. Unfortunately, word-of-mouth for the movie isn't good, and ticket sales slumped significantly as the weekend progressed. In other news, a re-release of the animated fantasy movie Avatar was a solid draw, taking in enough to win third place for the weekend. Read on for details.
Via Box Office Mojo.
This is another weekend that would have been the weakest in decades before the pandemic but was relatively solid in the terms of the current post-summer box office slump. With an overall box office of $59.7 million (up 17% from last weekend), this is the biggest weekend in over a month, the first time since July there were three movies over $10 million, and “only” the ninth lowest grossing weekend of the year. The tentpoles won’t begin to arrive for another three weekends to lift the overall numbers back up, but inpidual films are generally performing solidly, if not exceptionally. In other words, though the main events are missing, the counterprogramming is doing well. This weekend and the previous weekend both had newcomers opening to nearly $20 million and saw none of the holdovers in the top ten fall more than 42%, and while the overall numbers are still dismal by normal standards, the drought-era is not as bad as many had expected.
The weekend’s big newcomer Don’t Worry Darling certainly opened well with $19.2 million, just ahead of last weekend’sThe Woman King ($19.05 million) to become the top opener of the past five weekends. Warner Bros. launched the Olivia Wilde-directed film in 4,668 theaters, and it has been dominating headlines for all sorts of supposed behind the scenes drama. However, the major box office draw was likely the rabid fanbase of music star Harry Styles, who is in his first major film role after debuting in a smaller part in Dunkirk, and women made up 71% of the audience. Florence Pugh leads in the 1950s suburbia-set psychological thriller, and the supporting cast also includes Wilde, Gemma Chan, KiKi Layne, Nick Kroll, and Chris Pine.
Though the opening is not a knockout, it's a solid start for the $35 million budgeted film. The global total is $30 million, having opened in 61 overseas markets. Unfortunately, the film proved to be heavily frontloaded over the weekend after its strong $9.55 million Friday (including Thursday previews). Compare this to The Woman King, which had a near identical opening weekend with a Friday plus previews gross of $6.82 million. Hopefully that isn’t indicative of subsequent weekends, but we won’t really get a sense of its legs for a few more weeks. Audiences and critics were mixed on the film (B- CinemaScore and 38% Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes), so legs like the similarly female skewing Where the Crawdads Sing are a longshot (that film has grossed $89.6 million domestically off a $17.3 million opening), but it should be able to make up much of its budget theatrically.
Last weekend’s number one The Woman King had a nice hold as expected, coming in second place in its second weekend with $11.1 million, dropping just 41.5%. The ten day cume is $36.3 million, and though it still has a ways to go in recouping its $50 million budget, the strong word of mouth (this one got the highly coveted A+ CinemaScore) could pull in audiences for months, especially if it gets awards buzz. Internationally the film has a cume of $1.3 million from just Brazil and Nigeria so far, but it is one to keep an eye on as it expands.
In third place is the re-release of James Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi epic Avatar, which remains the highest grossing film of all time worldwide and the fourth highest grossing domestically. The re-release brought in $10 million from 1,860 theaters, making it the best grossing of the year’s re-releases.
Get the rest of the story at Box Office Mojo.