Box office: It's a spooky-movie showdown as The Nun II bumps A Haunting in Venice

Also: Oppenheimer is now the top-grossing biopic of all time, and more.

Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot in A Haunting in Venice.

There’s a spooky-movie showdown happening at the top of the box office this week.

As of Sunday, it was unclear whether the top film would be A Haunting in Venice, the third film in Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot murder-mystery series—this one takes place at a séance—or the horror film The Nun II, now in its second week.

Studio estimates gave The Nun a slight edge, with $14.7 million versus Venice’s $14.5 million, but that could change when the actual figures come out today.

Whichever film comes out on top in the end, it will be the lowest-earning #1 movie since Magic Mike’s Last Dance opened to a mere $8.3 million last February.

And it wasn’t just the top of the chart that was pretty soft this week. This was the second-worst weekend of the year for theatrical business overall. Only the Super Bowl weekend in February—when Magic Mike’s Last Dance opened—did worse.

Many people, of course, think the actors’ strike—which began just over two months ago, in mid-July—is partly to blame for this week’s soft performance:

• Some films that would have come out this year are getting bumped to next year, as the studios wait for the actors to become available for publicity purposes.

  • Case in point: This is the weekend that Challengers, a buzzy film starring Zendaya as a tennis pro caught up in a ménage à trois, was going to come out—but the film got punted to April 2024 soon after the strike began.

  • That left A Haunting in Venice as the only new wide release this week.

  • Fewer films = fewer ticket sales.

  • So this may be the first weekend that has been directly affected by a major film getting bumped specifically because of the strike.

• Some films are still coming out, but the actors can’t promote them, which could be particularly damaging to films that are defined by their ensemble casts.

  • The Equalizer 3 and The Nun II—the two biggest films to open this month—benefited from the fact that they were sequels to hit movies with iconic central figures (Denzel Washington in one, a creepy nun in the other). The absence of their stars from the publicity tours etc. arguably didn’t matter so long as people could see the ads and know what they were getting.

  • A Haunting in Venice, on the other hand, is part of a murder-mystery series in which every film has a completely different set of characters.

  • Yes, one can argue that Poirot, the detective who solves the mysteries, is an iconic figure of sorts, but Branagh is just one of the many actors who have played him… and the last film in this series wasn’t a hit, so it’s questionable how much of a draw Branagh-as-Poirot really is on his own.

  • So, audiences arguably needed to be introduced to the new characters, to learn who they are and why their story mattered enough to be seen in a theatre.

More thoughts and charts on this week’s top ten below.

But first, a few general points about the current state of ‘Barbenheimer’:

Barbie, for its part, held on to fifth place with an estimated $4 million, raising its total after nine weeks to $626.1 million, while its former chart-mate Oppenheimer landed in ninth place, with an estimated $2.1 million raising its total to $318.6 million.

Notably, both films continue to perform very well when you compare each weekend of their release to the equivalent weekends of their fellow post-Covid films:

This chart does not depict the figures for Weekends 1 to 6.

A few extra points to note about that chart:

• Barbie, which was one of the three or four top films each week for its first seven weeks, now ranks fifth among post-Covid films in their ninth weeks.

• Barbie, which was once well ahead of Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water, is now behind where those films were at this point in their releases.

  • It is now about $9.7 million behind Top Gun: Maverick.

  • It is also about $21.1 million behind Avatar: The Way of Water.

• Oppenheimer previously had the 17th-best first weekend of the post-Covid era, and its second to eighth weekends ranked between seventh-best and 13th-best. Now it has the 11th-best ninth weekend of the post-Covid era.

And now, a few more stats re: this week’s top ten, title by title: