Hello everyone,
Domestic Box Office: The box office for the end of Sept/start of October did a little better than the previous weekends thanks to 3 new movies opening wide. The total domestic for the weekend was approx. $85 million. However, none of the new releases met their predicted box office. The #1 movie was the animated “Paw Patrol The Mighty Movie” with $22 million, second was “Saw X” with $18 million, and 3rd was “The Creator” with $14 million. The slow rollout for “Dumb Money” turned out to be not so successful because the first weekend of its wide release moved the movie up only one spot from #8 to #7. It is now in almost 3000 screens but it only made $3.3 million this past weekend. Even the Fathom Event special screenings of “The Blind” beat it. That movie was #5 with $4.3 million although it was on about 1000 screens less than “Dumb Money”.
Worldwide Box Office: “Paw Patrol The Mighty Movie” was also the top grosser worldwide with $46 million. “The Creator” came in 2nd with a worldwide total of $32 million worldwide. “Saw X” was 3rd with a worldwide total of $29 million. “Oppenheimer” took another small step to what some people hope will be eventually be a worldwide total of $1 BILLION but the movie is only at $933 million worldwide right now so I think it’s slowing down too much to pass the billion dollar mark.
New Movie Release: Since the upcoming Taylor Swift movie is gathering a lot of press and a lot of hope for box office success, Beyonce decided she’s going to do the same thing. Advance tickets went on sale today for the “Renaissance: A Film By Beyonce” which will be released around the end of November. The only problem with that is there isn’t much opening over the next few weeks (some movies moved away from Taylor Swifts movie) but the end of Thanksgiving and the start of December currently has “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes”, “Trolls Band Together”, “Napoleon”, and the Disney animated movie “Wish” competing with the Beyonce movie.
Union Strike News: The ballots are starting to be sent to the WGA members to officially vote on the new contract (that most expect will pass) and today was the first day that studios met with the striking Screen Actors Guild. The announced late today that they would meet again this Wednesday and quite a few people are saying to not expect the actors strike to end soon. The writers strike took about 3 weeks from the first time they met with the studios back at the start of September to when they agreed on a contract so there is a possibility that the actors strike may not be done for WEEKS too.
Some are saying it would be unfortunate if the strike doesn’t end until the end of October because there will be very little time for TV and movie productions to start up again before people start going on vacation for Thanksgiving at the end of November and all the holidays in December (Hanukkah is Dec 7 thru 15 this year). That means a lot of productions are going to need soundstages, post houses, and VFX work at the start of the new year. Some people think there’s going to be some controversy. Will a crew member who hasn’t worked for about 5 months finish their work on a movie that is almost done (so they’ll only work a week or two) or will they take a job on a NEW movie which means working for a few months?
Little Bit of Humor:
I’m guessing NOBODY is ready for that. The fans of one movie certainly will not cross over to become fans of the other movie. Especially the young children going to see “Paw Patrol” and the and the hardcore horror fans going to see “Saw X”.
LOS ANGELES FILM REVIEW 