BLINK TWICE | THE FORGE | THE CROW openings | August 23 to 25, 2024 weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The current weekend: August 23 to 25, 2024
1) Blink Twice opening
- This is an average opening for an original crime thriller. There are a lot of crime thrillers and their box office performance is almost always cast-driven. High-profile ensemble casts are an advantage. In this case, Channing Tatum is carrying the film and the results are down the middle for the genre.
Critics' reviews are very good, while the audience score is lukewarm (a B- CinemaScore):
- At a modest cost of $20 million, this is the kind of movie that benefits from a theatrical release. It's going to raise the film's profile in every ancillary market it plays in, and eventually lift it to profitability.
2) The Forge opening
- This is a follow-up/spinoff to the 2015 inspirational Christian drama War Room that opened domestically to $11.4m and then played to an impressive 6x multiple. It's rare for an inspirational film to generate any kind of next episode — you can see it below.
The faith-based audience loves this movie (an A+ CinemaScore). The opening figure is better than average, although it’s down from the earlier film. The production budget was small (around $5 million). At that cost, The Forge is going to do well after all domestic ancillary income is counted:
3) The Crow opening
- This is a complicated movie. It’s a remake of the 1994 film, a comic book-based superhero story that plays as a dark, gothic, cultish crime fantasy. It’s not a superhero movie as we know it, and it’s not a mainstream crime thriller.
The first picture cost $24m to make and finished with $94m worldwide after its lead actor, Brandon Lee, died in an on-set shooting accident that happened at the end of production. This remake, which cost an est. $50m, doesn’t have the advantage of built-in interest from the past. Reviews are negative, and the audience reception is fair (a B- CinemaScore). The release isn’t working:
Overall
- Next week we'll have box office totals for the August period. Even with this subdued weekend, the numbers are excellent. Compared with both the pre-pandemic average and with last year, August is going to be up around +13%. That’s how good the month has been: Up approx. +13%. We'll have the exact figures next week.
And before it finishes in theaters, a last word about It Ends With Us. That movie could have opened to $15m, finished with $80m worldwide, and at a cost of $25m it would have done very well. Instead it opened to $50m, it’s going to finish with around $285m, and audiences are waiting for the next chapter (Colleen Hoover’s follow-up novel “It Starts With Us” was a bestseller in 2022 and 2023).
- The movie business thrives on this sort of thing — an original story in a quiet genre that explodes into a series. We can’t find an over-performance this good in a character-driven genre since Fifty Shades of Grey in 2015. It’s among the highlights of the summer, along with the record-breaking sequels, and it's another sign of the industry’s improving health.