Paramount and Legendary’s Street Fighter is headed for a $31 million opening weekend while A24’s long-secret documentary You Can See Everything outruns the costly dud Whalefall.
The Wrap reported that the Capcom fighting-game reboot took in $12.5 million on opening day, including $4 million from Thursday previews, and is tracking toward about $31 million for the full weekend.
That puts the $82 million Legendary-Capcom co-production in first place at the domestic box office. It is a solid start, not a blowout.
By comparison, Warner Bros. and New Line’s Mortal Kombat II opened to $38.5 million this past May. Street Fighter also drew a CinemaScore of B- and an 80% Rotten Tomatoes audience score, the same CinemaScore the 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme version earned decades ago.
The real surprise sat in second place. A24’s You Can See Everything, from Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder, pulled $5.5 million from just 855 screens and is on pace for a $12.5 million opening weekend.
That is enough to finish ahead of 20th Century Studios’ Whalefall, which is estimated at only $7 million from 3,065 locations despite a $60 million budget.
A24 kept the film under wraps for three years until a surprise Telluride premiere this past August. As of Saturday morning the studio said more than 1,300 screenings had already sold out.
Critics and audiences lined up behind it. Rotten Tomatoes showed 100% from critics and 98% from audiences. PostTrak logged a 92% “definite recommend,” well above the 81% The Odyssey posted this past summer. CinemaScore did not poll the title.
For context, Amazon MGM’s Melania opened to $7.1 million in February on roughly twice as many screens. Morgan Spurlock’s One Direction: This Is Us opened to $15.5 million in 2013. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 still holds the unadjusted documentary opening record at $23.9 million from 2004. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? finished with $22.8 million domestic, an early benchmark for how far a strong doc can run.
Whalefall’s soft launch stands out for the wrong reasons. The Austin Abrams film, from the Resident Evil lead, managed a CinemaScore B and Rotten Tomatoes scores of 71% critics and 82% audience, respectable marks that did not translate into ticket sales against a $60 million price tag.
Universal and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster’s Other Mommy had a rough second weekend too. It fell 72% to $7.8 million and sits at $44 million domestic after 10 days on a $19 million budget, still in better shape than Whalefall’s opening math.
Focus Features’ Sense & Sensibility, adapted and directed by Georgia Oakley, opened to $6.7 million from 2,545 screens with a primarily female audience. It earned a CinemaScore A- plus Rotten Tomatoes scores of 75% critics and 88% audience.
Hollywood keeps spending like the old rules still apply. Audiences keep proving they do not. A video-game reboot can open decently, a hidden documentary can outdraw a wide-release thriller, and a $60 million title can open to single-digit millions. Ticket buyers, not studio press releases, still set the price of failure.
