RENAISSANCE is Queen B, Godzilla wrecks shit, Silent Night goes down in a hail of bullets, and Other Box Office News.
For some reason I’ve never been able to quite figure out in the decade I’ve been doing these BORs, the weekend after Thanksgiving/first weekend of December has always been a major down period. The holdovers experience harsh drops and the new releases are the kind of no-hopers being dumped to fend for themselves, often with dismal reviews and equally-as-bad openings.
It should tell you something about how this weekend works that the best post-Thanksgiving weekend this century was The Last Samurai back in 2003 and that was just a $24.2 million hit. All of which is to say that, though we’re not dealing with the usual astronomical numbers which accompany such proclamations, this particular post-Thanksgiving weekend is perhaps the best in the years I’ve been covering the Box Office, with a suite of riskier bets holding their own and one almost managing to outdo mid-00s Tom Cruise for that “Best Post-Thanksgiving Opening of the Century” accolade.
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So, no, RENAISSANCE: A FILM BY BEYONCÉ did not come anywhere near close to replicating TAYLOR SWIFT | THE ERAS TOUR numbers, but we’re talking about different ball games. Swift released hers between legs of her world tour, Beyoncé several months after her world tour wrapped up. Swift has been completely inescapable in 2023 and refuses to let the media forget about her for even a minute, releasing albums and new songs around the same time as her film, and went on a marketing blitz for it; Beyoncé mostly seems to think of herself as above that game nowadays, appealing more to her ravenous cult rather than winning over casuals, and did a similar (comparatively) minimal marketing job for her film as the RENAISSANCE album got.
Regardless, both did great business for cinemas during struggling down periods in the release schedule, so nothing is gained by putting both women in competition with each other. $21.8 million, a per-theatre average of $8,586 which is the third-best of any Wide-release movie since Halloween, is a very solid performance that should be celebrated. Half of it’s going directly into the half-a-billionaire Bey’s pocket, anyway, so it’s not like she’s gonna lose sleep over how much chump change was or was not made this weekend.
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This also turned out to be a very strong weekend for films not in the English language, which have seen an uptick in mainstream acceptance in recent years yet still outperformed expectations here. Godzilla Minus One will be the headline grabber; partly a result of it being one of the year’s most acclaimed films, partly because miserable idiots keep trying to invoke its $15 million budget as some kind of “GOTCHA!” to recent Hollywood blockbusters despite the fact that it’s only so cheap cos Japan notoriously overworks and underpays its crew and animators/CG artists even worse than the US. In any case, an $11.4 million opening in third place is the best for a non-anime Japanese movie at the US Box Office that I can recall.
Yet the real overperformer was arguably Bollywood action-drama Animal which, according to Bruce Nash at The Numbers, posted the best single day ever for an Indian movie in North America with its $2.78 million Friday, leading to a $6.4 million overall finish in seventh. As Americans proved more receptive to films in a foreign language, however, they also proved themselves to be unreceptive to films in no language… cos they have no dialogue. John Woo’s big, polarised return to Hollywood, Silent Night, that proceeded to make very little noise aside from some disgruntled murmurs if the “C” Cinemascore and $3 million ninth-place start are anything to go by. Choosing to believe this is because the film allegedly doesn’t feature any gratuitous dove shots. GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT, WOO!
PLEASE, DO NOT BE ALARMED. REMAIN CALM. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE THE PAGE. THE WRITER IS CONDUCTING A TROUBLESHOOT TEST OF THE ENTIRE FULL LIST.
US Box Office Results: Friday 1st December 2023 – Sunday 3rd December 2023
1] RENAISSANCE: A FILM BY BEYONCÉ
$21,801,216 / NEW
Not as controlled as Homecoming, meaning that it can really feel the extended length and never fully hits the transcendent highs of that masterwork, but still a hell of a document of perhaps the best live show I’ve been to in my entire life. Whole filmmaking modules should be taught on its usage of match cuts. I’m not normally a fan of IMAX – it’s too much for me, so big and so loud that it becomes oppressively overwhelming – but being forced to see it in the format turned out to be the right call cos that sound mixing was impeccable, deafening in the right way. That said, it is taking all my strength not to write the whole thing off over the decision to chop out most of the ‘PURE/HONEY’ vogue break and move the bits kept to much earlier in the show. A part of my queer soul was awoken and now lives at that section, how DARE you shit on it like this, Ms. Carter!!!
2] The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
$14,173,460 / $120,916,868
Right as I was getting into the groove of penning this week’s BOR, New Jersey’s finest Screaming Females announced they were calling it quits after 18 years, cos 2023 won’t stop kicking me in the shins. If you’re unfamiliar, they quietly have one of the century’s best rock discographies – the kind of shit-kicking, fret-ripping, passionate-screaming, hook-riddled rippers this genre is best at – and are absolutely worth getting into. Desire Pathway, their excellent album from this year, has been getting paid dirt by music publications’ Listmases, but they went out on top of their game with it.
3] Godzilla Minus One
$11,419,975 / NEW
Fun Fact: Amy Walker is so excited for this, and so confident that it’s going to be amazing, that she initially put her name down to write it up for our Listmas Films article until she realised the film releases here right after the editorial deadline. I’d make fangirl jokes, but she really knows her stuff when it comes to Toho monster movies, so I’m gonna assume her faith is coming from the kind of “they cannot possibly fuck it up” context I don’t have.
4] Trolls Band Together
$7,830,405 / $75,063,460
Fine, I’ll watch Trolls World Tour this week just so I have something to talk about in this section next time. Get off my case.
5] Wish
$7,707,150 / $42,251,092
The Chris Pine Disney Villain Song lived up to my expectations, some awkward phrasing aside. Honestly, all of the songs were excellent, and I even really liked the Paperman visual style getting to try out a full feature. If only both were in service of a film instead of a “Spot the Disney Reference” Buzzfeed listicle.
6] Napoleon
$7,276,612 / $45,891,855
On the subject of mass-appeal media bending the truth for nebulous reasons, I spent almost six hours this weekend watching video essays about James Somerton because I am either: a] A devout follower/enabler of Hbomberguy and his descent into madness (with Todd in the Shadows being collateral). b] Secretly a messy bitch who loves drama no matter what I may publicly say. c] Stuck in such a pit of self-loathing that I willingly let myself listen to Somerton’s smug, abysmal, droning voice spout shit like “the Nazis were responsible for modern fitness culture” and “all the interesting gays died during the AIDs crisis” for way longer than any human being should. See if you can figure out which is most accurate!
7] Animal
$6,479,167 / NEW
It’s nearly Xmas and you may be struggling to figure out what stocking stuffer to get that special someone in your life, or even just an activity to keep everyone interacting with each other once the Xmas dinner has been gobbled up. Never fear, Paul Regan is here with a rundown of the season’s big new board games, so you can find a fun time without risking the violence of Monopoly!
8] The Shift
$4,300,165 / NEW
Rather than give oxygen to Angel Studios’ latest slice of ‘cool’ Christian propaganda, let’s take a sec to note a couple of the Limited Releases whose performances I couldn’t fit into the prelude prose for space constraints. Eileen, a psychosexual thriller from Lady Macbeth’s William Oldroyd, ensnared $93,920 from 6 screens under its sexy spell; a PTA of $15,548 that, somehow, wasn’t the best of the weekend. Nor, as it turns out, was ultra-cynical road-trip satire The Sweet East’s $30,969 from 1 screen; only good enough for the silver medal. Instead, gold honours go to the “481/2th Anniversary” re-release of Monty Python and the Holy Grail which made $478,142 from *checks notes, checks them again, reboots laptop to make sure this isn’t a typo* 2 screens; a PTA of $239,071?! That can’t be right?!
9] Silent Night
$3,010,207 / NEW
It is an actual artistic crime that the rights for John Woo’s legacy-defining and ultra-inspirational Hong Kong action classics like Hard Boiled and The Killer are caught up in the kind of licensing hell from which few ever escape. Cultural vandalism that these will seemingly never get a new release because the corporations who bought up the rights in fire sales just won’t even acknowledge they have them, even when Woo himself tries to make it happen. Something needs to be done about the trash fire of dead licensing rights for art like this.
10] Thanksgiving
$2,621,721 / $28,369,354
Amy Walker’s penultimate Comic Cave entry for the year looks at the famous Dark Phoenix saga of Uncanny X-Men, a run that she swears is better than the two shit movie adaptations made it sound honest.
Dropped out: The Marvels, The Holdovers, TAYLOR SWIFT | THE ERAS TOUR, Saltburn