Twisters Blows Away Expectations With An Exceptional Opening Weekend At The Box Office
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The summer 2024 box office has been quite the roller coaster, hasn't it, folks? There was oh so much doom and gloom when Hollywood didn't see the high-profile titles that hit the big screen in May live up to expectations, but the profile of the season wholly changed when the calendar turned to June. Since then, we've seen a number of surprises and big successes, including Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah's Bad Boys: Ride Or Die, Kelsey Mann's Inside Out 2, Chris Renaud and Patrick Delage's Despicable Me 4, Osgood Perkins' Longlegs, and now Lee Isaac Chung's Twisters.
There has been buzz building for weeks that the new disaster movie was going to be a significant hit, and that prophesizing has proven true and then some. It was obvious while writing my box office report last Sunday that the blockbuster was going to debut as the #1 domestic release during its opening weekend, and yet, its numbers still managed to be bigger than expected. Check out the full Top 10 below and join me after for analysis.
Twisters Just Had The Third Biggest Opening Weekend Domestically Of 2024
Last week, reports suggested that Twisters was looking to be chalked in as a win for the box office with a $50 million three day start – which would have been good enough to rank in the Top 10 opening weekends for the year. That didn't happen. Instead, the new sequel to 1996's Twister far exceeded expectations, and if early numbers hold true, it just had what will go down in the books as the third biggest debut of 2024.
With $80.5 million earned since the beginning of public screenings late last week, Twisters has (according to The Numbers) made just a tad more money domestically in its first three days than Adam Wingard's Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire – which made $80 million when it arrived in on the big screen in late March/early April.
In the context of being a "franchise" film, the folks at Universal Pictures must be happy (though whether or not its a true sequel has been debated by the likes of Twister director Jan de Bont and Twisters star Glen Powell). While one obviously has to account for inflation when discussion a film that was released nearly 20 years ago, Twister made $41.1 million in its first three days in theaters back in May 1996, and it ended up being the second biggest domestic hit of the year making $247.1 million. Twisters is going to have to make a whole lot more than that it had a pre-marketing/publicity budget of $155 million (per Variety).
As a cherry on top, foreign markets are reporting that the film has made $42.7 million thus far – which brings its global box office haul to date to $123.2 million. That's enough to already put it in the Top 20 for 2024, which is a pretty damn good start... and pretty important given that the strength of its legs is going to be a question mark in the weeks ahead.
I say this not because audiences aren't enjoying Twisters (it got an "A-" grade from CinemaScore after critics delivered some high marks) but because of the competition that is on the horizon. While the disaster movie was given this past weekend to dominate and be the hottest new title in theaters, that spotlight is quickly moving away in a few days to shine on what is expected to be the biggest box office hit of the summer if not the year: Shawn Levy's Deadpool & Wolverine, which is arriving in theaters on Friday. There is quite a bit of targeted demographic overlap between the two tentpole releases, so there is high expectation that the performance of one will have an impact on the other... but positive word of mouth might keep both of them in a good place
We have seen a number of big movies co-exist at the box office in 2024 thus far, like Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two and Mike Mitchell's Kung Fu Panda 4 in the spring and Bad Boys: Ride Or Die and Inside Out 2 last month (or even Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 right now). Perhaps a rising tide will lift all boats?
Longlegs Has A Soft Weekend-To-Weekend Drop As Hype Keeps People Seeing The Horror Mystery
Last week, Longlegs was the big story at the weekend box office, as while the horror movie only debuted in second place, it performed well-beyond expectations thanks to positive word of mouth and a super creepy marketing campaign. There was, however, a question about sustainability. The "C+" grade from CinemaScore surveys and the 63 percent Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes suggested potential turbulence... but the film was ultimately able to weather all that and just had a solid second weekend.
According to Deadline, Longlegs cost less than $10 million to produce, and it just added another $11.7 million to its domestic tickets sales in the last three days. That's a soft 48 percent weekend-to-weekend drop from its $22.4 million debut, and to date, it has now made $44.7 million in the United States and Canada.
After just a little over a week playing in wide release, it is already the second biggest box office success that Neon has had a distributor, as the film has now outgrossed Craig Gillespie's I, Tonya from 2017. It only needs to make about $9 million more to surpass the ticket sales for Bong Joon-ho's Best Picture-winning Parasite.
As noted earlier, we are now just a few days away from what should end up being the biggest box office weekend of the year thanks to the arrival of Deadpool & Wolverine... but just how much money will it make, and how will all of the titles currently playing on the big screen fare in its shadow? I'll be back here on CinemaBlend next Sunday to answer all of those questions and more – and you can check out our 2024 Movie Release Calendar to discover all of the features that are set to arrive in theaters in the weeks and months ahead.
