Box Office Report: The Shark is Still Broken

The late August drag is slowly giving way to the fall festival season, but for now, we’ve got the dregs. In fairness, they’re pretty good ones, given that their distributors are clearly ditching them in not-so-great slots on the release calendar. Weapons is still on top after four weeks. The horror has had great word-of-mouth and solid meme potential. In its fourth week of release, it’s now at $132.3 million domestically. Add to that an extra $100 million from international grosses, and we have one of the true mid-budget non-IP hits of the year so far.

Sometimes, though, you just can’t beat the classics. It’s been 50 years since Steven Spielberg redefined the Summer movie release with Jaws. Hot take: it’s still brilliant. Nowadays, we appreciate it as one of the greatest films ever made, and clearly, audiences are still hungry for it. The 50th anniversary re-release saw the movie on IMAX and 3D screens, and it earned $8.1 million.

That was enough to put it ahead of the biggest new release of the past week, Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing. Austin Butler and his cute cat debuted at number three with $7.82 million from 3,578 locations.

At number five was The Roses, the remake of The War of the Roses starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman. Reviews were soft, and its opening weekend grosses were similarly small. It earned $6.35 million from 2,700 cinemas. That put it behind Freakier Friday, which is at $80.4 million domestically after a month.

Just outside of the top ten is The Toxic Avenger, the gooey remake of the Troma classic, starring Peter Dinklage and Elijah Wood. The film had its premiere in 2023 and struggled to get a distributor because it was seen as too gross for theatrical audiences. We’re in a post-The Substance world nowadays, and there is plenty of room for the real sickos at the multiplex. Alas, The Toxic Avenger didn’t come with the intense buzz of its body horror contemporary, and it brought in $1,755,151 from just under 2,000 places.

In limited release news: indie drama A Little Prayer, starring David Strathairn, made $67,200 from 70 cinemas; documentary Sharing Aloha grossed $54,285 from 37 locations; and romantic drama Love, Brooklyn earned $49,000 from one theatre.

This coming week sees the release of the horror sequel The Conjuring: Last Rites and the cinematic re-release of Hamilton.

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