Horror Pic ‘The Invitation’ Leads Worst Weekend At This Summer’s Box Office, All Pics Grossing $54M
27.08.2022 - 18:33
/ deadline.com
SATURDAY AM UPDATE: The bowels of the summer box office have been reached with Sony’s new C CinemaScore horror movie The Invitation leading with $6M-$7M at 3,114 theaters. Like the late Andy Rooney, I get a lot of mail from sources, but in this instance it’s about why it’s important to be gentle when covering the box office. We’re still in the pandemic, we’re not back yet, it’s not good for our business to be nasty, blah blah blah. However, simply putting random movies in theaters without any great P&A spend doesn’t do the box office, or exhibitors any favors. This weekend will rank as the lowest grossing weekend to date of summer with an estimated $54M for all titles (some even have it lower). If it makes anyone feel better, it’s not the worst weekend of the year. That belongs to Jan. 28-30 when all titles made $34.9M per Box Office Mojo.
On some level, I get it: It’s late August. A majority of kids are back in school (Comscore says 32% K-12 were out yesterday, with 38% colleges on break), and Sony traditionally has had a horror film at this latter part of the summer. But let’s be honest, the more you spend, the more you gross. True, the diagnostics here on this period vampire thriller at a 29% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 53% audience score, doesn’t warrant a studio to spend wads of cash to open it. But we’ve seen Sony do better with less: Their August movie Slender Man which had a D-, 8% critic score and 17% audience on RT opened to $11.3M and had a 2.7 multiple.
Social media chatter on The Invitation wasn’t horrible, racking mixed leaning positive according to RelishMix with “fans comping and calling-out Vanilla Sky, Ready or Not, Twilight, Meghan Markle and Jordan Peele films too. Chatter wonders how these
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