Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s Dune earned $40.1 million despite facing double the domestic box office competition. The science fiction epic of the Legendary and Warner Bros. studios. opened simultaneously in 4,125 theaters across North America and on the HBO Max streamer. This is a hybrid practice used for all of Warner’s 2021 films due to the pandemic. Dune had the best domestic opening of any similar theatrical/grossing film on HBO Max to date, beating out Godzilla vs. Kong ($31.7 million).
The independent film industry received a huge boost from Wes Anderson’s French Dispatch, which was released by Searchlight Pictures in 52 theaters and earned the highest average score of any film since opening. The opening of The French Dispatch in 14 cities is estimated at 1.3 million.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage set a million dollar opening record this weekend, averaging around $25,000 per screen. By comparison, the per-theater average for Venom 2 (after closing after $90 million at the box office) averaged $21,300 per screen. New York’s Angelica Theater was the top theater, reporting several sold-out screenings .
Universal’s horror sequel Halloween Kills led last weekend’s box office, but didn’t kill it in its second outing, with a 70.6% drop in theaters for the sophomore to an estimated $14.5 million. That’s notably larger than the comparable drops for 2018’s previous release Halloween (-58.7 percent) and the 2007 film also called Halloween (another entry in the long-running franchise), which dropped -63.9 percent. Kill’s sharp drop is largely due to its daytime debut on NBC’s Peacock studio service, as during the pandemic such releases often fell more than expected. Kills has grossed $73.1 million to date, down 42.0 percent from 2018’s Halloween gross of $126.0 million.
The United Artists Releasing / MGM action-adventure sequel No Time to Die fell -50.0% to an estimated $11.8 million in its third weekend. In its previous outing, the 56.9% drop in box office for a James Bond film was the second biggest of the five installments in the Daniel Craig franchise: and steeper than 2006’s Casino Royale (-24.6%), 2012’s Skyfall r (-53.4%) or in Ghost of 2015 (-52.1 percent), although not as sharply as on Quantum of Solace in 2008 (-60.4 percent)
The cumulative box office this weekend was approximately $93.5 million. That’s down -14.1% from last weekend (when Halloween Kills led with $49.4 million), up 8.4 times from the same weekend in 2020, when movies were just starting to return to theaters (when Honest Thief led the second weekend with $2.3 million), and is down 13.0% from the same weekend in 2019 (when Maleficent: Mistress of Evil led the second event with $19.3 million).
This weekend’s third-place finisher, action-horror Venom 2, earned $6.1 million in North America (US and Canada combined). To date, the film has earned $115.6 million, and on the international market $290.8 million.