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Box Office: Tyler Perry's 'Boo 2!' Tops Friday As 'Geostorm' And 'Snowman' Flop

This article is more than 6 years old.

Lionsgate

This was an ugly, ugly Friday for new releases, both regarding (alleged) quality and box office strength. After last weekend's run of four good-to-great wide release titles (Happy Death DayThe ForeignerMarshall and Professor Marston and the Wonder Women), this weekend sees five new wide-ish releases, only one of which is remotely well-reviewed and just one of which is connecting at all with paying consumers. Yeah, the news is mostly grim.

The one bright spot on Friday was Tyler Perry's Boo 2!: A Madea Halloween, which topped the box office on Friday with a solid $7.47 million. That's right is right in the happy place concerning Perry's opening day grosses. Even the most oblivious entertainment journalist has stopped being shocked... SHOCKED whenever a Perry melodrama or comedy opens well, so the film's likely $21m debut weekend is a shock to absolutely no one.

No, it's not as big as the $28.5 million debut of Boo: A Madea Halloween a year ago, but the question is whether the sequel will parlay the holiday into better-than-normal legs. Boo! earned $73.2m domestic from a $28.5m debut last year, a huge (for Perry) 2.56x multiplier. There is a more seasonal competition this year, including Lionsgate's own Jigsaw opening next weekend.

Boo 2! cost $25m to produce, a record for a Perry movie, so it may actually have to maintain some post-debut strength (or make more than $1.5m overseas) to get into the black before post-theatrical. While Perry may be leaving for Paramount/Viacom Inc. soon, we'll see if Boo! becomes a seasonal tradition.

And it's all downhill from here.

Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. and Skydance's much-delayed and heavily retooled Geostorm limped into theaters yesterday, lacking both press screenings and much in the way of Thursday night advance screenings. Yeah, thanks a lot, Rotten Tomatoes. Dean Devlin's directorial debut, after decades of producing the likes of Independence DayStargateThe Day After Tomorrow and 2012 (among others), cost around $120 million and earned just $4.3m on Friday.

That sets the stage for a $12.5 million debut, which is pretty awful even if the film miraculously has legs heading into the holiday season. As good of a year as Warner Bros. had, this is arguably the second much-delayed/much-retooled big budget offering (along with King Arthur: Legend of the Sword) that was essentially put out to pasture. Sure, there is hope that the sci-fi disaster thriller will play better overseas. It has earned $29m worldwide thus far.

The one well-reviewed movie of the weekend is Sony's Only the Brave. They picked up the Black Label picture after Lionsgate dropped it, and it looks like Lionsgate made the right call. Despite mostly good reviews, the Josh Brolin/Miles Teller/Jeff Bridges/Taylor Kitch/etc. drama, about a true-life tragedy concerning elite firefighters combatting a massive forest fire, earned just $2.1 million yesterday. That sets the stage for a $6.2m debut weekend, which is awful for a $38m production.

The Joseph Kosinski-directed picture may be good (my wife was interested so I''m waiting until our schedules align), but Lionsgate watched last year as its two Mark Wahlberg-starring/Peter Berg-directed true-life tragedy thrillers (Deepwater Horizon and Patriot's Day) both underperformed and reacted accordingly. There was a time when a movie like this would have been an A-level studio programmer, and Sony even sneaked it last weekend to build word-of-mouth. Alas...

And last and least is Same Kind of Different. The faith-based drama, starring Greg Kinnear, Djimon Hounsou and Renée Zellweger, was initially intended to be a Paramount release before they dropped it and PureFlix snapped it up. Paramount will still handle ancillaries, but the poorly-reviewed drama earned just $1.347 million yesterday for a likely $3.94 million debut weekend. And that's all I have to say about that one.

Last and possibly least is Universal/Comcast Corp. and Working Title's The Snowman. The Tomas Alfredson serial killer thriller, which earned bad reviews but good fun from its goofy poster, grossed just $1.342 million yesterday, including $270k in Thursday previews. That sets the stage for a grim $3.67m opening weekend, which is awful for a $35m-budgeted release, even if the film already has $10m overseas.

The picture was a victim of a rushed production schedule whereby the director admits that he didn't shoot 10-15% of the script. Of course, even if everything went to plan, serial killer melodramas haven't been a thing in a very long time, and this isn't exactly the time for movies about asshole men rescuing women from worse asshole men. This is just the kind of movie that would be at home as a Lionsgate Premiere VOD title, and Michael Fassbender again proves that he's a great actor but not remotely a movie star in the financial sense.

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