Box office: Left Behind cracks the top ten
Plus: a few other notes about this week's hits and misses, and what they say about the Oscar nominations, the significance of theatrical windows, and more.
Just a quick note about this week’s box-office stats.
In a nutshell: The top four films are all big(-ish) Hollywood movies that have been around for about a month or more, but the rest of this week’s top ten is an odd jumble of genre flicks and specialty releases—including a certain end-times movie:
Avatar: The Way of Water — $15.7mil — $620.6mil total — Week 7
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish — $10.6mil — $140.8mil total — Week 6
A Man Called Otto — $6.8mil — $46.1mil total — Week 5
M3GAN — $6.4mil — $82.3mil total — Week 4
Pathaan — $5.9mil — $8.5mil total — Week 1
Missing — $5.7mil — $17.6mil total — Week 2
Plane — $3.8mil — $25.4mil total — Week 3
Infinity Pool — $2.7mil — $2.7mil total — Week 1
Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist — $2.4mil — $3.0mil total — Week 1
The Wandering Earth II — $1.4mil — $1.4mil total — Week 2
A few quick points about these films:
Avatar: The Way of Water and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish are the only films that landed in the top ten after getting Oscar nominations this week—and they were going to be at the top of the list anyway, with or without the nominations.
Three other Oscar contenders—Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Whale, and Women Talking—were virtually tied for the #13 spot, with roughly $1 million apiece. So that, it seems, is about as good as the “Oscar boost” gets these days, even for films like The Whale and Women Talking that are only playing in theatres.
Puss in Boots has shown remarkable staying power. It made only $12.4mil in its first weekend, but it has stayed afloat ever since and has now grossed $140.8mil in North America and $334.1mil worldwide, making it easily the second-highest-grossing animated film of 2022 (behind Minions: The Rise of Gru) and the third-highest of the decade (behind also Sing 2, which came out in December 2021—and at the rate Puss in Boots is going, it could quite possibly pass that film).
Even more remarkably, Puss in Boots has stayed afloat at the box office despite being available to rent online for the past few weeks—so all the arguments to the effect that short theatrical windows are the death of family films may need to be rethought. (Disney films like Encanto, Lightyear, and Strange World all got windows of at least one month, and they were box-office disappointments. Puss in Boots had a window of just two and a half weeks, and it’s a box-office success.)
On that last note: Deadline noted the other day that 2022 marks the first time since 2008 when every DreamWorks animated film made more money worldwide than every Disney animated film. (The other DreamWorks film in 2022 was The Bad Guys. In 2008, the DreamWorks films were Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, while the Disney films were WALL-E and Bolt.)
Two of this week’s top ten films are foreign-language releases: Pathaan is from India, and The Wandering Earth II is from China.
And now for a few points about Left Behind, which is the main reason I’m writing this post:
The first “faith-based” film to crack the top ten was the end-times movie The Omega Code, in 1999. It grossed $2.4mil in 304 theatres on the same weekend that Fight Club came out, and it went on to gross $12.6mil in total.
The first Left Behind movie opened to $2.2mil in 867 theatres in 2001, and it failed to crack the top ten; in fact, it landed way down at #17. But the release of that film was arguably undermined by the fact that it came out on video several months earlier. (If memory serves, the producers thought Christians would be motivated by the video to help promote the theatrical release to their non-Christian friends, or something like that.) The film topped out at $4.2mil—only a fraction of what The Omega Code made—and its sequels went straight to DVD.
The Left Behind reboot with Nicolas Cage opened to $6.3mil in 1,825 theatres in 2014, and it was in the top ten for two weeks. It grossed $14mil in total.
And now, Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist has apparently grossed almost $3mil in roughly 1,400 theatres since opening on Thursday—the exact number of theatres varies from day to day—and it has landed at #9 on the weekly top ten.
Given the surging number of theatres—304 to 867 to 1,400 or more—and given rising ticket costs, the fact that end-times movies have stayed in the $2mil-to-$3mil opening-weekend range for the most part over the past quarter-century indicates that the audience for such films isn’t exactly growing. Granted, the 2014 film with Nicolas Cage is an exception to this rule… but that film starred Nicolas Cage. It also came out in 2014, the year of God’s Not Dead, Son of God, Heaven Is for Real, and a bunch of other “faith-based” films that were even bigger hits.
It’s fascinating to compare this weekend to the last weekend that a new Left Behind movie came out. In October 2014, the Nicolas Cage version of Left Behind came out on the same weekend as Gone Girl and Annabelle, both of which opened to over $37mil. Five films made over $11mil that week, and every film in the top ten made at least $2.5mil. And now, almost eight and a half years later? The #1 film made $15.7mil; only one other film made at least $10mil; the highest-grossing new film made $5.9mil; and the #10 film made $1.4mil. Some of that might be January versus October. But a lot of it is the lack of new movies in theatres post-Covid.
Anyway. I now find myself thinking about The Chosen: Season 3 Finale’s prospects next week in a way that I never did before. The Chosen was supposed to be in theatres for two days only—one of which, a Thursday, doesn’t count towards the weekend figures—but I see that tickets are now being sold for all weekend, so who knows?
Granted, The Chosen will have stiffer competition next week than Left Behind had this week, as three new films are slated for a wide release: M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin, the seniors’ sports-fan comedy 80 for Brady, and the animated film The Amazing Maurice. But the bottom half of this week’s top ten is so weak that it’s quite possible those films will fall behind whatever The Chosen makes next week.
As ever, we shall see.
P.S.: I did get a chance to watch a screener of the new Left Behind film a while ago, but it was a fairly rough cut with unfinished visuals—in some scenes, people were reacting to smartphones with blank green screens, and I had no idea what they were looking at—so I didn’t feel I could review it. Maybe some day, though.