Napoleon fails to conquer, Disney’s Wish isn’t granted, few take up the invite to visit Saltburn, and Other Box Office News.
Happy Turkey Day Weekend, one and all! The natural hunting grounds of one Hunger Games franchise which, after posting a modest opening last weekend, has strode confidently back to reclaim what once was indisputably theirs! Despite having a pair of big-name, big-budget releases looking to claim the turkey-coated crown, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes surprisingly, and with little effort, swatted both away to retain the top spot on the chart with $28.8 million over the three-day (and $42 mil over the five-day weekend). A sophomore drop of just 35%, which is precisely the range that a somewhat soft-opening blockbuster should be falling in its second frame, and that’s all the Marvels talk I’m going to do this week cos, again, it just makes me sad and tired. Since that takes The Ballad to just shy of $100 mil domestic (the second Lionsgate film this year to cross that mark after John Wick: Chapter 4), I suspect Suzanne Collins will be getting forcibly shuttled back to her typewriter to crank out more Hunger Games prequels for big-screen adaptation any day now.
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But what of those new releases? Well, we got inconsequential news and we got more bad news. Let’s start with the inconsequential, since it also means we go down the chart in order: Napoleon. Ridley Scott’s latest, extremely messy, super-long, bitterly divisive, and very expensive historical epic – or, for redundancies sake, we can just say “Ridley Scott’s latest” – came up well short of conquering all and standing tall (there’s your one played out “Napoleon was supposedly small” gag) with a second-place finish and $20.4 million (raised to $32.5 mil over the five-day). That should be a concerning start for a movie with a near-$200 mil budget and dismal “B-” Cinemascore… except, of course, for the fact that Napoleon is an Apple TV+ Original so any amount of money from box office tickets is just a juicy bonus for the tech-nopoly indulging in film and TV as a fun side-hobby more than anything else. Hence, inconsequential; a load of words wasted on nothing (tagline of this weekly series).
As for the more bad news, it’s yet another expensive Disney underperformance/flop in a year where they’ve been incapable of staying away from such headlines. Their big centennial celebration Wish, which has also become the worst-reviewed Walt Disney Animation Studios film since Chicken Little back in 2006, was one of those parties where you invite all your classmates but only four or five end up attending – and they’re the proper awkward kids you can’t relate to who themselves only showed up because their parents forced them so it just becomes a deeply uncomfortable affair for everyone involved. Third place on both the three-day ($19.5 mil) and the five-day ($31.7 mil), tucked up close behind Napoleon yet somehow unable to pull off the insurrection despite a vastly superior Cinemascore of “A-”. Admittedly, it’s significantly better than what Disney’s Strange World managed on this exact weekend last year ($12.15 mil three-day and $18.86 mil five-day), but too late for that kind of nuance, the kids (or grown-ass adults with a mental capacity somehow even lesser than kids) are already posting “WASHED” and “GET WOKE GO BROKE” gifs on Twitter.
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Lastly, Oscar-winning screenwriter, amateur edgelord, literal heiress, and noted wannabe dino-erotica maker Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn went Wide after its big splash of an opening last weekend in 7 theatres ($322,651 for a PTA of $46,093). It’s absolute fucking dogshit but at least the wider public wanted nothing to do with the thing; a “B-” Cinemascore, tenth place on the three-day with $1.735 million, and eighth on the five-day with $2.72 million as Alexander Payne’s much-older Holdovers took it to the woodshed (making more on just the three-day with $2.75 mil). See, we do try to find some good news every now and again!
*Jim Carrey in The Mask voice* And now, like Napoleon, I shall divide (Full) and conquer (List)!
US Box Office Results: Friday 17th November 2023 – Sunday 19th November 2023
1] The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
$28,820,000 / $98,373,951
Rachel Zegler is excellent in this. Almost the entire cast are – even Viola Davis, who appears to have been given entirely different direction from everyone else yet nonetheless works – but Zegler just commands the screen every time she’s centred (and even when she isn’t). Really hope she gets out of Snow White unscathed cos between this, West Side Story, and even Shazam! Fury of the Gods, she’s absolutely got It.
2] Napoleon
$20,400,000 / $32,500,000 / NEW
Won’t be seeing this for a little while because a friend of mine whom I’m making plans to spend a day out with wants to see it so gotta hold fire. Whilst I’m not going to validate the recent Twitter DISCOURSE which tries to insist Ridley Scott is some kind of overrated hack – if we’re sincerely using the “hack” charge against a guy who directed Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, and Gladiator, then words don’t mean shit anymore – I will freely insist that he is the most wildly inconsistent filmmaker still working. Like, you really do not know until the lights come back up whether you’re getting a masterpiece, an outright disaster, a frustrating half-success story, or something that’s just mid. That’s kinda exciting, in a perverse way.
3] Wish
$19,500,000 / $31,700,000 / NEW
Should have seen this by the time these words go live. If nothing else, I hope that the Chris Pine Disney villain song lives up to the hype that the phrase “Chris Pine Disney villain song” instils within me. It’s been a rough year, let me have this win!
4] Trolls Band Together
$17,520,000 / $64,468,460
Thank God, I didn’t become Cal-stradamus; a clean, clear loss to Wish. Now this week’s Disney DISCOURSE will be 5% less insufferably hyperbolic and toxic than initially forecast!
5] Thanksgiving
$7,275,167 / $24,193,000
Whilst we’re here, I’d just like to state that the firing of Melissa Barrera from Scream 7 and the dropping of Susan Sarandon from her agency – both borderline blacklisting – for their pro-Palestine comments in the face of Israel’s ongoing genocide, a term that multiple Jewish historical scholars with ties to Holocaust organisations have used when discussing the events in the country, against Palestinians is disgusting bullshit. An act that reeks of McCarthyism, Islamophobia (Palestinians are majority Sunni Muslim), and outright hypocrisy when you have people like Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, and Noah Schnapp freely sharing around anti-Palestinian and pro-Zionism propaganda to zero consequence – Silverman guest hosted The Daily Show again two weeks ago. Not to mention the fact that Mel Gibson continues to have a Hollywood career despite literal decades of antisemitic speech, which makes the reasoning from Spyglass and UTA that Barrera & Sarandon were sacked on those grounds all the more laughable.
Criticism of Israel’s often monstrous leadership and actions over the last few months is not automatically antisemitism, the hostages on both sides should be returned, full ceasefire now, and free Palestine.
6] The Marvels
$6,400,000 / $76,853,446
On the subject of fun little sci-fi franchises whose fanbases have been flooded by loudly toxic assholes determined to ruin them for everyone else, the new Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who kicked off on Saturday! Did he pick back up like no time had passed? Did he rescue Who from Chris Chibnall’s malaise? Did he successfully piss off all the bigots? You already know the answer to the last one, but Lee Thacker is here to solve the other two outstanding queries.
7] The Holdovers
$2,750,000 / $12,889,285
So, after all that talk about this week being when it would “go Wide,” it ended up adding only another 123 theatres which changed nothing. Bit of an anti-climax, especially since the film has otherwise been putting in quietly excellent week-on-week performances (this is a 2% increase on last weekend’s take). So, y’know, perfect time to stick it on Digital/Streaming rather than ride that momentum to more theatrical money.
8] TAYLOR SWIFT | THE ERAS TOUR
$2,330,000 / $178,265,894
In news which broke last week during that sinkhole between penning and publishing, 20th Century Studios (a subsidiary of Disney) decided that it couldn’t be arsed to release the highly-acclaimed, crowd-pleasing, star-studded, Jeff Nichols-directed motorcycle drama The Bikeriders after all and pawned the thing off. It has now found a home, landing at Focus Features, but still. Seriously, let me have a go at running a movie studio; these pillocks clearly don’t know how to do their jobs, so I couldn’t be much worse!
9] Five Nights at Freddy’s
$1,750,000 / $136,209,340
Heard of Dark Winds? Likely not cos it’s an AMC+ series and you’re already at your limit when it comes to streaming services. But Caitlin Dickenson is here to tell you that this Navajo detective series is real good and worth picking up now it’s available on home media!
10] Saltburn
$1,735,000 / $3,097,279
Interminable wank. Don’t get drawn in. It wants you to debate its borderline-incomprehensible class politics – which mostly devolve to “anyone lower than landed gentry are scum who just want their money despite said gentry’s worst crime being obliviousness” – and be riled up by its increasingly desperate efforts at provocation that are as transgressive or shocking as a child drawing a dick on the classroom chalkboard, cos then you’re treating it like a real movie despite it doing nothing worthy of such. Just ignore the thing; it’ll stop trying to put the cat in the tumble-dryer when it realises you’re not gonna engage. Have we learned nothing from Joker?
Dropped out: Next Goal Wins, Priscilla, Killers of the Flower Moon