They’ll be grinning from ear-to-ear over at Paramount this morning with the news that their horror-hit Smile has over-performed to the tune of $22 Million at the North American box-office this weekend.
We called Smile “stylishly framed and derivative in all the best ways” in our ★★★★ review, and it appears that audiences agreed, because for a film that cost a reported $17 million and was set to debut on Paramount+, Smile posted one of the best genre openings of 2022. What’s more the film grossed an additional $14.5 million from international territories, bringing it’s global cume to a very impressive $36.5 million.
With Halloween just around the corner it’ll be interesting to see whether Smile has the same legs as the similarly performing The Black Phone, which opened with $23 million back in June, before going on to make $160 million worldwide.
While there were plenty of smiles on the faces of those who turned up to watch Billy Eichner’s ground-breaking LGBTQ rom-com Bros (read our ★★★★ here), there were not enough of them to prevent the Judd Apatow-produced comedy disappointing with a lowly $4.8 million, which is just over half of what Universal were projecting for the $22 million budgeted movie.
With the tabloid tittle-tattle fading and the Harry Styles fans hardly clamouring for repeat viewings, Don’t Worry Darling dropped to second place, but took a 62% hit in the process for a weekend tally of $7.3 million. The domestic cume for the Olivia Wilde directed drama sits at $32.8 million, and is holding steady in overseas markets for a worldwide gross of $54.7 million after 10 days.
There were strong holds for the Avatar re-release, which took its domestic gross to $19 million and its international takings to a relatively whopping $58 million, while The Woman King’s strong word-of-mouth meant it dug in at number 3 with $7 million, lifting its North American cume to $46.7 million.
Let us know what you saw at the weekend by heading to our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
As always the full chart rundown can be found over at BoxOfficeMojo.
