'Halloween Ends' Offers Hope for a Strong Box Office Weekend

After months of sleepy weekends with disappointing ticket sales, theater owners are finally likely to get a boost this weekend. Horror sequel (and supposed franchise finale) Halloween Ends is expected to have the biggest opening since the last Marvel blockbuster in the summer. Despite poor reviews from critics, the movie will probably draw out enough moviegoers to make this biggest box office weekend of the fall. Read on for details.

Via Box Office Mojo.

At last, the reinforcements are arriving. After 11 weekends in a row under $100 million and seven in a row under $65 million, the overall box office will finally start returning to non-disastrous levels this weekend with the first tentpole title in months, Halloween Ends. Unless the Universal film has a huge overperformance, we won’t be getting into the nine digits this weekend, but Halloween Ends should be the top opener since Thor: Love and Thunder over three months ago and it will likely lead the biggest total weekend box office since Bullet Train opened in the first weekend of August (that weekend had an overall cume of $92.1 million, a number that is possible but not especially likely this weekend). Next weekend, the combination of the Dwayne Johnson-starring DCEU film Black Adam and the George Clooney and Julia Roberts starring rom-com Ticket to Paradise will be enough to push the box office past the $100 million mark for the first time since July.

Halloween Ends, which opens in 3,800 theaters and has screenings beginning at 5 P.M. Thursday, concludes the David Gordon Green-directed trilogy that began with the 2018 Halloween. That film brought back Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode in her epic battle against Michael Myers, and it successfully rebooted the classic horror franchise, becoming its biggest hit to date with $159 million domestic and $255 million worldwide off a slender $10 million budget. Last October’s follow-up Halloween Kills didn’t quite recapture the box office magic, but it was still the long running franchise’s second best grossing film, and grading it on the pandemic curve and accounting for its day-and-date availability on the streaming service Peacock (which Halloween Ends will also be available on from tomorrow), the $92 million domestic and $132 global cumes are still commendable (not to mention very profitable given its $20 million budget).

Halloween (2018) opened to $76.2 million, and Halloween Kills opened to $49.4 million, which is still the best launch for a horror film since the start of the pandemic. Halloween Ends looks to end up closer to Halloween Kills than to the first film of the trilogy, but how well it plays relative to its predecessors could depend on how well it is received. After the critically acclaimed 2018 reboot (79% on Rotten Tomatoes), which scored the best reviews for the series since the 1978 John Carpenter-directed original, Halloween Kills was seen as a disappointment. Only 39% of critics gave it a positive review, and audiences also ranked it lower than the previous outing, with Halloween getting a B+ CinemaScore (quite good for a horror film) and Halloween Kills getting a B-. Few reviews are in yet for the finale, but it could overperform if audiences feel that it sticks its landing. If it tops the last installment, then it may have an opening that surpasses many of the total weekend box office cumes of the past few months.

Beyond Halloween Ends, it will be a quiet weekend, and we possibly won’t see any other film gross above $10 million. The one film that has a chance is Smile, the season’s most impressive hit thus far. The $17 million budgeted horror film has crossed $100 million worldwide in less than two weeks, and it had a second weekend hold for the history books as it dropped only 18.3% domestically and actually grew in holdover territories abroad. If it drops less than roughly 46% from its $18.5 million second weekend, then it can remain in the double digits, but it may not retain such a big audience now that another major horror film is on the market. Either way, it is grinning all the way to the bank.

Get the rest of the story at Box Office Mojo.