Broadway Box Office Holds Steady At $29M; ‘Phantom’ Nabs $1.6M; Gabriel Byrne‘s ’Walking With Ghosts’ Joins The Roster

Gabriel Byrne’s Broadway solo show Walking With Ghosts will play its final performance on Sunday, November 20, a week shy of a month after its Oct. 27 opening at the Music Box Theatre.

Two of the fall Broadway season’s buzzy new musicals – A Beautiful Noise, The Neil Diamond Musical and Some Like It Hot – began previews last week, both doing solid business in their first, partial weeks.

EXCLUSIVE: Comic monologist Mike Birbiglia has made an early Broadway splash with his new show The Old Man & the Pool, selling out his first four previews last week – the only other production with all seats filled was The Phantom of the Opera – and, Deadline can report exclusively, getting a two-week extension of his run at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater.

Are rivalries the greatest motivation for success? Few come close to that of automotive legends Ferruccio Lamborghini and Enzo Ferrari. The new film “Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend” explores one man’s quest to achieve racing immortality.

EXCLUSIVE: We have learned that Lionsgate has acquired the upcoming action-thriller One Ranger, which stars Thomas Jane and John Malkovich.

Let’s celebrate the heydays of this autumn’s box office where we can, the season greatly hampered by a lack of tentpole product.

Finally, after a very long drought at the box office, a fire-breathing theatrical-windowed tentpole arrives in New Line’s Dwayne Johnson title, Black Adam.

Broadway box office held steady at $28,621,480 last week as a slate of new productions began or continued previews (Almost Famous and Kimberly Akimbo filled more than 90% of their seats), MJ and Leopoldstadt set house records and The Phantom of the Opera was once again standing room only as the long-running Andrew Lloyd Webber musical heads toward its Feb. 18 closing.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Homecoming, a patriotic rescue movie, dominated the mainland China box office for the third successive weekend. Overall numbers remained anemic in the first full week after the National Day holiday period, sometimes referred to as a ‘Golden Week’. “Homecoming” garnered $12.1 million (RMB85.6 million) between Friday and Sunday, according to data from consultancy and research firm Artisan Gateway. That gave the film a 64% share of the nationwide weekend aggregate. Accordingly, it was far ahead of second-placed film “Give Me Five,” which released on Sept. 9, 2022. “Give Me Five” earned just $1.9 million over the weekend, for a six-week cumulative of $63.8 million.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief While the Busan International Film Festival was busily hailing a return to normality the slump at South Korea’s commercial box office deepened dramatically over the most recent weekend. Cinemagoing nationwide was worth only $4.20 million between Friday and Sunday, the lowest weekend total since April and a time before Korean cinemas shed their COVID restrictions. The weekend’s top film “Life Is Beautiful” managed the lowest first place score of any film this year, with a weekend haul of just $777,000, according to data from Kobiz, the tracking service operated by the Korean Film Council (KOFIC).

Chinonye Chukwu’s Till got off to a solid start at the specialized box office, grossing over $15k per theater from 16 locations in five markets for an estimated weekend gross of $240.9k, possibly more depending on how Sunday plays out.

“Halloween Ends” is only just beginning.The slasher film cut its way to first place at the box office on Friday, earning more than $20 million in theaters.The sequel to last year’s “Halloween Kills” is predicted to take in $43.4 million on its opening weekend, according to Variety.“Smile” was bumped from the top spot this week, moving down a notch to second, after spending two weeks at number one.The flick surpassed earnings of $100 million at the global box office in less than two weeks, as per Collider.The live-action/CGI musical comedy “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile” swam down to third place, clawing in $2 million. The movie adaption of the popular children’s book series enjoyed a $11.5 million domestic debut on its opening weekend, according to Deadline.“The Woman King” held up her crown, remaining in fourth, with a $1 million-dollar take.

$49.4 million last year and finished with a $92 million domestic total, and pre-release projections for “Ends” have it matching that opening mark with a $50 million opening. By contrast, the first installment in this “Halloween” revival in 2018 opened to $76 million on the way to a $159 million domestic total and $255 million worldwide, buoyed before its release by strong reviews from critics praising Jamie Lee Curtis’ return to her debut role, Laurie Strode, that expanded interest beyond the series’ most devoted fans. “Kills,” on the other hand, got much poorer reviews, with critics slamming the sequel for sidelining Laurie in the hospital instead of having her take the murderous Michael Myers head-on like she did in the first film.

Paramount’s Parker Finn-directed horror pic Smile has laughed its way across the $100M mark globally. And it did so in under two weeks of release. Through Tuesday, the gross is $102.3M worldwide, made up of $55.5M domestic and $46.8M from the international box office. 

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Laurie Strode is going out with a bang. “Halloween Ends,” the supposed finale to Universal’s long-running slasher series (are we ever going to be able to quit Michael Myers?) is targeting a healthy $50 million to $55 million in its opening weekend even with its hybrid release on Peacock. If those estimates hold, it’ll be the first movie since “Thor: Love and Thunder” in July to open to at least $50 million. “Halloween Ends” is the rare day-and-date release with a proper point of comparison since its predecessor also launched on streaming during the pandemic. “Halloween Kills” opened to $49 million last October while landing simultaneously on the NBCUniversal-owned Peacock — a bloody-good result given the COVID-era limitations in 2021. “Halloween Ends,” which is playing in 3,800 North American theaters, has the added benefit of monopolizing the entire Imax and premium large format footprint.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter At the box office, horror movies have a tendency to run out of steam faster than a teenager being chased through the woods by a masked killer. Even the most successful scary stories are known to earn the bulk of their money in the first weekend of release. Yet “Smile” and “Barbarian,” two recent big-screen thrillers, have defied conventional wisdom by impressively sticking around in theaters after opening weekend. Ticket sales for “Smile,” in particular, nominally declined in between its first and second weekend of release, a sign of exceptionally positive word-of-mouth. Over the weekend, Paramount’s “Smile” retained the No. 1 spot in North America with $18 million, sliding just 18% from its $22 million start. At the international box office, something even crazier happened: “Smile” actually improved on its debut by 31%, bringing in $19.1 million in its second weekend. And it continues to flex during the week, adding $2.6 million domestically on Monday. After only 12 days in theaters, the movie is already nearing the coveted $100 million mark. It’s a bloody-good result for the $17 million-budgeted “Smile.”

Naman Ramachandran After 22 weeks in cinemas across Ireland and the U.K., writer-director Colm Bairéad’s “An Cailín Ciúin” (“The Quiet Girl”) has crossed €1 million ($971,000) at the box office. The film is Ireland’s entry in the Oscars’ international feature category. Based on Irish author Claire Keegan’s story “Foster,” the coming-of-age film, set in rural Ireland in 1981, follows Cáit (Catherine Clinch) as she is sent from her overcrowded, dysfunctional household to live with distant relatives for the summer. It has been an unstoppable force on the festival and awards circuit, winning top prizes at the Berlin, Dublin and Taipei film festivals and sweeping the Irish Film and Television Awards. Produced by Cleona Ní Chrualaoi for Inscéal, the film is distributed by Break Out Pictures and Curzon.

Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl, which is Ireland’s entry in the Best International Film Oscar race this year, has punched through the €1m ($971,000) box office ceiling in a record-breaking performance for an Irish-language feature.