Box Office Report: Freddie Mercury Still Deserves Better

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | November 4, 2018 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | November 4, 2018 |

Look, I can’t turn this whole report into a screed against Bohemian Rhapsody, even though I totally could. I really hated that movie, you guys. What an insulting and ineptly made mess, and no amount of Queen fans in my Twitter mentions telling me I just ‘didn’t get it’ will change my mind, okay? Anyway, the film made $50m this weekend, well ahead of projected numbers and only $2m short of making its budget back. Let’s be honest, this film was basically critic proof. If you like Queen and just wanted to see those songs on the big screen, you were going to see this. Having said that, the moment someone tries to use this film’s commercial success to write some think-piece on Bryan Singer’s ‘redemption’ gets thrown into the lava pit.

The news wasn’t so good for The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, which fell below projections to open with $20m. Disney have mostly been killing it in their live-action movies but that only seems to apply for ones that are remakes of their classic animations or stuff from their acquired franchises. It may have seemed like a good idea at the time to try and get an easy to copyright Nutcracker adaptation on the market before Christmas, but did anyone really ask for this?

Opening at number 3 is Nobody’s Fool, with around $14m. It’s a Tyler Perry movie, it was always going to do well but it also seems like a good sign for Perry that his foray into truly R-rated cinema has paid off. It’s also another sign of Tiffany Haddish’s growing box office power.

A Star is Born continues its slow burn domination of the box office, dropping only 20% from last week after 5 weeks in the top 5. Halloween may have fallen from 1 to 6 in its 3rd week but it still has $150m in the bank from a $10m budget so Jamie Lee Curtis can rest easy. She deserves it. Even Venom is holding on okay, dropping just 26% in its 5th week to bring its domestic total to just below $200m. It’s very close to breaking into the top 10 highest grossing films of 2018, although it seems more likely that the year will end with at least 5 Disney films in the list if Mary Poppins Returns does as well as we’re expecting it to.

Outside the top ten, Amazon Studios expanded the release ofBeautiful Boy to 540 theatres and grossed around $1.4m. If this one can hold on, it may end up being the studio’s true Oscar hopeful. Although it must be said that their other major release of the season, Suspiria, is holding on nicely, expanding to 311 theatres in its second week and bringing in just under $965k. It’s averaging around $3100 a theatre. Can it hold onto that?

The two big indie releases of the weekend were Boy Erased, another much buzzed Oscar hopeful, and A Private War, the Marie Colvin biopic starring Rosamund Pike. The former grossed $220k from 5 theatres - a massive $44k per theatre average - while the latter took in $72k from 4 theatres.

This coming week sees the release of Gary Hart biopic The Front Runner, grungy horror movie Overlord, a new animated version of The Grinch, and the latest Dragon Tattoo movie starring Not Rooney Mara.

You can check out the rest of the weekend box office here.

What films did you watch this weekend? Let us know in the comments.