Box Office Report: Era Defining

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | October 16, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | October 16, 2023 |

The box office calendar rearranged itself with very short notice when Taylor Swift announced her plans to release a concert film of her ongoing Eras tour. Blumhouse pushed The Exorcist: Believer forward one week in the hopes of retaining some of its commercial power, but that film being bad probably hurt it way more than Swift could. So, this means that The Eras Tour opened in 3,855 theatres with no competition this past weekend. Even if it had faced some tough opponents, I doubt it would have struggled to snatch the top spot. As it is, we have a $96 million domestic opening, which averages out at about $24,902 per venue.

This also means that it is already the highest-grossing concert film of all time. After less than one week. The previous record holder, Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, made over $99 million over its entire worldwide run in 2011. Concert films tend to be somewhat niche and require a major star to make any real kind of cash. Swift is obviously a superstar who can basically do whatever she wants. This is the kind of record that will be tough to beat, although we are getting Beyonce’s Renaissance very soon. Isn’t it nice that two popstars decided to bolster numerous world economies this year?

Since there weren’t any other major releases this weekend, let’s look at the overall grosses for 2023 so far. Barbie is comfortably the highest earner of the year, with $1,438,372,000 in the bank as of the writing of this piece (and it’s still in cinemas.) The Super Mario Bros. Movie is behind it with around $1,362,738,119, while Oppenheimer is comfortably in third place with over $942 million. It might struggle to get that last push to $1 billion in its final weeks of release, but don’t put it past Universal to give it that help with an extended IMAX run or something.

Can any movie beat that top three? I don’t personally think so. I can certainly see something like The Marvels breaking into the top ten since, you know, Marvel gonna Marvel. Even with the franchise in a wobblier state this year, they still got Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 to $845.5 million worldwide. The only other real competitor I see is Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, but that’s no guarantee. DC has done horribly these past two years, and this sequel cost so much money and has been mired in bad headlines (justice for Amber Heard, who is being thrown under that bus hard by Warner Bros.) That first movie did make $1 billion worldwide but is there a drive for this movie, especially since the pre-Gunn, post-Snyder era of the DCEU has all but been thrown away? I think Barbie can rest easy as the big victory of 2023.

This coming week sees the release of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, the horror movie Soul Mates, and rom-com The Other Zoey.

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