It’s officially the holiday season as far as Hollywood is concerned, and it’s our friendly neighborhood Predator who is spreading some early PG-13 comfort and joy, with $40 million in the bank.
That’s enough for Predator: Badlands to technically be a best for the franchise, eclipsing the $37 million Alien Vs. Predator (which was, funnily enough, also rated PG-13) opened to in 2004. Not to rain on a good parade, but that’s not accounting for inflation, and really, we’re talking about a four-day weekend here as showtimes for Badlands started at 2:00 on Thursday. Still, Disney has nothing to frown about here, as this was superior to the disappointing premiere of Tron: Ares last month.
You gotta hand it to everyone involved with this victory. They took a real risk here in making the Predator the hero (even though, you know, he kind of was one in Alien vs. Predator, but I digress), which could have easily alienated longtime fans. Instead, Badlands scored the best reviews for a theatrical entry in this series (remember Prey went straight to streaming). But I do encourage Disney not to get too excited: we really don’t want an Alien film where the Xenomorph is the good guy, thank you very much.
But we have another winner this weekend: Regretting You, which is showing amazingly strong legs. Maybe October was the wrong time to release this one. Maybe the word-of-mouth over this critically reviled romance is strong. Or maybe Colleen Hoover is simply the new Nicolas Sparks as far as the box office goes. It’s not going to finish anywhere near the kind of numbers It Ends With Us managed (it has yet to even reach what it pulled off for its opening weekend), but a drop of just 9% is still insane in today’s climate. So…good job?
As for our other openers…they aren’t. The best of the batch was the faith-based Sarah’s Oil of all things (which I guess didn’t look terrible?), and that made $4.4 million, which tells you how bad our remaining newcomers are. The Oscar contender Nuremberg had some very solid marketing, but this is the sort of entry that needs a smaller screen count before gradually going wide in order to build up awards and audience awareness. And speaking of wannabe trophy contenders, Die, My Love died a quick death, with an opening of only $2 million and a dismal ‘D+’ CinemaScore. For Jennifer Lawrence, this is a different sort of role, similar to 2017’s mother! (which got an ‘F’ CinemaScore), and for what it’s worth, I couldn’t really tell what this was about besides her and Robert Pattinson screaming at each other.
That said, our worst opening of the weekend–and one of the worst of the entire year–is the boxing biopic Christy. It punched up only $1 million, not even good enough for the top ten. For Sydney Sweeney, this is another box office flop, but then again, I don’t know how many people even knew this film existed. Maybe she needs to make Anyone But Two after all.
Anyway, the top ten, via The Numbers
