Box Office Report: The Clown is Down

Scary clowns are in. No, not that one. We’re talking about Art of Terrifier, the little horror franchise that could. The third entry in this hyper-gory series opened in the top spot this past weekend with an impressive $18.3 million from 2,514 theatres. Halloween and horror movies go hand in hand (dismemberment optional.)

DreamWorks and Universal’s latest animation, The Wild Robot, is holding on strong in its third week. It’s now earned $83.7 million domestically and a sequel has been greenlit.

And then there’s Joker: Folie a Deux, which is falling apart. It opened at number one last week but with greatly reduced grosses, and now it’s plummeted a staggering 81% in its second week of release, falling to number three with only $7 million taken in this past weekend. What happened? Remember, this movie cost $200 million! Well, bad reviews, distaste for the musical aspect, sequel fatigue (and for a film that had a complete narrative), and an ending that told all the fans of the original to go f*ck themselves probably didn’t help. Honestly, the ending was the thing I liked about it. This will be a catastrophic write-off for Warner Bros. It needed about $500 million to break even. That’s not happening.

Things also weren’t great for Piece by Piece, the Pharrell Williams animated Lego biopic. People like Pharrell. They like Lego. But this combination didn’t make much sense and the reviews weren’t rapturous enough to excite audiences away from the clown (no, not that one.) It debuted at number five with $3.8 million from 1,865 cinemas.

It’s a one-two punch of animation at spots eight and nine. The former spot is occupied by the anime My Hero Academia: You’re Next with just over $2 million from 1,845 locations. The latter goes to The Nightmare Before Christmas in yet another seasonal re-release, with $2.3 million from 1,700 places.

Landing at number ten is The Apprentice, the movie where Sebastian Stan plays Donald Trump. Reviews have been pretty positive among American critics but let’s be honest here, who the hell wants to watch this film of their own free will? Trumpites don’t want a biopic about his monstrous rise to the top where he’s depicted raping his first wife, and everyone else doesn’t want, well, that. It might hold on for awards voters, if only because the Best Actor race this year is extremely sparse, but everyone else said no. It only earned $1.58 million from 1,740 locations.

Some religious movie called Average Joe grossed $1,115,895. Okay. The Florence Pugh-Andrew Garfield romance We Live in Time opened in five theatres and earned $225,911. Six Days in August is another religious movie, but this time it’s a Mormon one, and it made $84,574. Mormon cinema is a whole thing and I know next to nothing about it.

This coming week sees the release of horror sequel Smile 2.

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