Box office: Scorsese, DiCaprio return to the big screen and take streaming with them

Killers of the Flower Moon, which reunites Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio after their separate gigs with Netflix, is the first Apple TV+ film to get a major theatrical release.

Mollie (Lily Gladstone) and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Killers of the Flower Moon.

Taylor Swift and her concert movie ruled the box office for a second straight week this weekend, while Martin Scorsese had one of the biggest openings of his career with a film he made for a streaming service.

The two films, each unconventional in its own way, were part of a broader trend: only half of this week’s top ten films, if that, were typical new studio movies. The rest of the list consisted of foreign, indie, and anniversary releases.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour won the weekend with an estimated $31 million, raising the film’s North American total to $129.8 million. That was enough to make it the first concert movie ever to be #1 for two weeks.

Scorsese, meanwhile, had the third-best opening of his career with Killers of the Flower Moon, a three-and-a-half-hour epic about crimes committed against the Osage Nation after oil was discovered on their territory in Oklahoma in the 1920s.

The film earned an estimated $23 million, which beat the debuts of all previous Scorsese films except for 2010’s Shutter Island and 2006’s The Departed.

Both of this week’s top two films took unusual routes to the big screen: Swift skipped the studio system altogether and distributed her movie through one of the nation’s largest theatre chains, while Scorsese’s film was produced by Apple TV+ and is the first of their films to get a wide, open-ended theatrical release (with a bit of help from Paramount).

And those weren’t the only films this week that weren’t exactly typical new studio product. This week’s top ten also included:

• The Nightmare Before Christmas (#5), a 30th-anniversary re-release.

• Leo: Bloody Sweet (#8), a Tamil-language film from India.

• The Blind (#10), a “faith-based” biopic distributed by Fathom Events.

One could also point to Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie (#4) as an example of this pattern, as it is basically a Canadian film that is being distributed outside of Canada by Paramount. (In Canada, Paw Patrol is distributed by Elevation Pictures.)

The only films in this week’s top ten that were actually made this year by the legacy Hollywood studios were, arguably, The Exorcist: Believer (#3), Saw X (#6), The Creator (#7), and A Haunting in Venice (#9)—three of which, as befits the season, are spooky or scary movies of some sort (and all three of those films are sequels).

Is the top-ten dominance of non-studio movies this week a coincidence, or is it a sign of something bigger? It’s hard to say.

It could be partly due to the actors’ strike, which prompted the studios to put off some of their bigger, less Halloween-y films until the actors could promote them. (Killers of the Flower Moon premiered at Cannes in May, two months before the actors’ strike began, so the publicity for that film had already begun.)

Or it could be the lingering effect of an industry that is still trying to recover from the pandemic and all the changes to moviegoing habits that resulted from that. Earlier this year, the months before summer had very few big releases—which allowed “faith-based” films and other smaller films to rank fairly high on the charts—and maybe the months after summer were always going to feel a little sparse, too.

Either way, in the absence of new studio films, non-new or non-studio films are filling the gap—or at least taking up space on the charts.

And theatres will have to hang tight for another couple weeks at least. Aside from Five Nights at Freddy’s—yet another horror film, and one that could have the biggest opening of any non-concert movie since the ‘Barbenheimer’ duo three months ago—there’s nothing all that big on the horizon until The Marvels opens November 10, and even that film is looking a little shaky at the moment.

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