Without a single trailer announcing its release, a film called The Empty Man opens wide this weekend. It is a horror film from the Fox banner, which may explain why it’s being unceremoniously dumped into the pre-Halloween frame. What Disney hopes to accomplish with this move is uncertain, but a great weekend at the box office will not be the end result.
Our Highest Rated Films: Synchronic
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OTHER LIMITED RELEASES
The Empty Man (Wide)
Bang Bang (Limited)
Conundrum: Secrets Among Friends (Limited)
Friendsgiving (Limited)
Nationtime (Virtual)
With little else in the way of new releases, it’s clear Honest Thief will top the box office. If there’s one box office draw that appeals to audiences in middle America where theaters are open, it’s Liam Neeson as his movies tend to make decent money in those regions.
The final nail in the 2020 box office may have been the move of No Time to Die into 2021 leaving only two big films yet to move, Dune and Wonder Woman 1984, but likely to do so, especially after Regal Cinemas’ parent company decided to shutter their theaters nationwide and in the United Kingdom and Ireland. This move signals a worsening economic depression than expected. Still, there are some wide release films available for moviegoers including this week’s latest attempt to keep Robert De Niro working in the least glamorous projects possible. In War with Grandpa, De Niro moves into his child’s home where he is forced to share his grandson’s room. His grandson doesn’t like it and a war begins between them. It’s the kind of wasted fluff that he’s been making in between celebrated work, but at this juncture he doesn’t have to. It’s the only wide release this weekend, but even those prospects aren’t great all things considered.
Tenet shouldn’t have anything to worry about from this weekend’s lone new wide release. The Broken Hearts Gallery may be the first romantic comedy to release wide at re-opened cinemas, but the film doesn’t seem like the kind that can translate into big box office.
With a small opening weekend, The New Mutants proved that in the heartland, where theaters are open, there is some modest amount of money to be made. It doesn’t, however, remove the doubt that the costs provide the vast majority of a film’s box office success. This weekend may either prove the low-number trend or suggest that there could be a revitalization going on.
After two years of delays, Fox’s final X-franchise film is finally seeing release. Clearly being dumped on the second weekend of theaters across the country opening, it’s obvious Disney does not and never has cared about the film and is merely wanting to get rid of it so it can drop everything old and move forward with everything new. That said, the film had long promised to be the latest attempt by the old 20th Century Fox to infuse something inventive and original into the Marvel cinematic universe. With Logan and Deadpool before it, the idea was to go different directions. A grizzled old road movie, a foul-mouthed superhero, and a group of mutants being tortured and stalked in a horror environment were all attempts to tell unique stories and to latch onto the R-rated landscape that Sony and Disney never thought would be profitable for them. And now, with a whimper, the legacy of the Fox X Universe comes to a resounding thud. Perhaps we’ll see a surprise box office triumph for the film and that would tell Disney to button its lip about the prospects, but more likely is the film is going to fail with audiences not wanting to risk catching a deadly or debilitating virus and it will fade from existence proving Disney was right (which it isn’t).
With two films this past weekend not appearing on release calendars universally, The SpongeBob Movie and Unhinged (thought it was only released in Canada), it’s possible something unexpected could drop in cinemas this weekend. However, that likelihood is limited and the supposed Unhinged wide US release this coming weekend is about all anyone can expect other than the standard slate of limited releases.