Beetlejuice Beetlejuice couldn’t be scared away from the top spot at the box office, proving to be one of Tim Burton’s biggest openings.
Even though summer is officially out of the way, the box office was still something to keep an eye on this weekend. Labor Day proved to have a pretty lackluster outing at the movies but as we near spooky season, we knew one movie would help bridge the gap between the beaches and the haunted houses.
After strong daily outings and major buzz, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice expectedly took the #1 spot this weekend, pulling in $110 million and marking not only the third-best opening weekend of the year but one of Tim Burton’s biggest box office openings ever, trailing only Alice in Wonderland. For the record, 1988’s Beetlejuice took in $8 million on its opening weekend. Even when adjusted for inflation, the sequel pulled in more than five times that over the course of just one weekend.
Since we all pretty much knew that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice would be the ghost with the most at the box office this weekend, it became a bit more fun trying to figure out how the rest of the top 10 would pad out. So, let’s take a look…
The second-highest-grossing movie of the year, Deadpool & Wolverine, is still holding remarkably strong at the box office, with the MCU entry taking in an additional $7.2 million at the #2 spot, further securing it as the biggest money maker of any R-rated film, with over $1.27 billion worldwide so far. Coming in at #3 is a movie of a very different tone: biopic Reagan, which bumped up a spot from last week via another $5.2 million. Rounding out the top five this week were Alien: Romulus, which is crawling towards the $100 million domestic mark courtesy of another $3.9 million, and It Ends With Us, the Colleen Hoover adaptation which took in nearly as much this weekend and has done quite well despite some behind-the-scenes controversy.
The bottom half of the top 10 at the box office was led by The Forge, which made $2.9 million, just enough to beat Twisters, which has yet to fall from the top 10 even though it has been eight weeks. The only other movie to break the measly $2 million mark this week was Blink Twice, which made $2.1 million and came in at #8. Despicable Me 4 also held on, although its $1.8 million won’t do anything to get it near the $1 billion worldwide mark, which is officially out of reach. Coming in at #10 was A24’s The Front Room, which took in just $1.6 million on more than 2,000 screens, with audiences clearly disinterested in Brandy leading a horror movie in 2024 (although we will always dig her in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer).
Next week will see a handful of new releases, including the American remake of Danish thriller Speak No Evil, the Dave Bautista-headed actioner The Killer’s Game, Sundance hit My Old Ass, and Kevin Smith’s The 4:30 Movie. These will probably have fairly calm outings at the box office as we await the noise of Transformers One, with the Demi Moore sensation The Substance and Clooney-Pitt pairing Wolfs also coming out on September 20th, although you can expect the latter to suffer because it heads to Apple TV+ the following week.
Did you catch anything at the cinema this weekend? Which movie did you help bump the box office numbers for?