Box Office: ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Stays No. 1 as ‘Speak No Evil’ Impresses and ‘Killer’s Game’ Bombs
Tim Burton and Warner Bros.’ Beetlejuice Beetlejuice lost none of its ghostly mojo in its second weekend and easily stayed atop the box office chart with an estimated $51.6 million as it hurtles toward the $200 million mark domestically.
The pic, playing in 4,575 theaters domestically, fell just 54 percent for a 10-day domestic total of $188 million. Overseas, the sequel took in another $28.7 million from 76 markets for a lukewarm foreign tally of $76.3 million and $264.3 million globally.
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Blumhouse and Universal’s new horror-thriller Speak No Evil was also good news for the early fall box office. The pic opened in second place with an estimated $11.5 million from 3,375 locations against a budget of just $15 million before marketing. The movie follows an American family as they spend the weekend at a plush British estate only to discover that their host, played by James McAvoy, has a rather sinister side. McAvoy is earning strong marks for his performance.
Speak No Evil boasts an 85 percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and a B+ CinemaScore from audiences. Overseas, it started of with $9.3 million from 73 markets for a global launch of $20.8 million.
Marvel and Disney’s Deadpool & Wolverine held at No. 3 all the way in its eighth weekend, with an estimated $5.2 million for a domestic cume of $621.5 million and $1.305 billion worldwide, the seventh-biggest showing of any MCU title.
In the biggest surprise of the weekend, conservative provocateur Matt Walsh‘s Am I Racist? opened in fourth place with an estimated $4.8 million from 1,517 locations, the top debut of 2024 so far for a doc and the third biggest since Disney’s nature film Bears a decade ago. Am I Racist? is doing big business in conservative markets in the South, Midwest and Mountain States.
The Justin Folk-directed film, described as a “social experiment,” comes from Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing’s The Daily Wire and marks the company’s first theatrical launch for an in-house production with distribution handled by SDG Releasing.
In the film, which is drawing comparisons to Borat in terms of its tactics, Walsh tricks his subjects by assuming the role of a DEI trainee who attends anti-racism workshops, crashes private intellectual dinner parties and conducts sit-down interviews with experts and everyday Americans alike on the topic of racism. The film also discloses the fees paid to certain experts, including Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. In recent days, DiAngelo blasted Walsh and said she had donated her $15,000 fee to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund.
Walsh posted on X (formerly Twitter) Saturday that while the film boasts a 99 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, no “mainstream film critics” have reviewed his film. Elon Musk, owner of X, gave a shout out to Am I Racist? when retweeting Walsh: “That is an amazing audience score!”
Ronald Reagan biopic Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid, rounded out the top five with $3 million from 2,450 cinemas in its third weekend for a domestic total of $23.3 million through Sunday.
The big casualty of the weekend was Lionsgate’s new action pic The Killer’s Game, starring Dave Bautista as a veteran hitman who orders a contract for his own murder after being mistakenly diagnosed with a terminal condition. The R-rated movie came in sixth place with a dismal $2.6 million from 2,623 theaters after earning poor reviews and a B+ CinemaScore from audiences.
Fathom Events also made the top 10 with God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust, which grossed $1.8 million from 1,312 locations. And the distributor’s latest rerelease of the cult classic Coraline has now amassed $33.4 million in its 15th anniversary celebratory run.
At the specialty box office, the critically acclaimed Sundance Film Festival favorite My Old Ass reported a promising per theater average of $24,535 upon opening in promising numbers in seven theaters in New York, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas. From Amazon and MGM, the coming-of-age story revolves around an 18-year-old who meets her older self. Aubrey Plaza and newcomer Maisy Stella star in writer-director Megan Park’s second feature, which will expand into a total of 32 cinemas in 10 markets.
Sept. 15, 7:45 a.m.: Updated with revised weekend estimates.
This story was originally published Sept. 14 at 10:05 a.m..
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