Verity is set to open at #1 while Digger fights four holdovers for second

With presales as strong as they were all week, Verity was always going to win the weekend, and $32.6M is a strong start, actually coming in just ahead of Practical Magic 2 from a few weeks ago. It came in at the very top of our $24–32M range and right in the middle of Friday’s update. It’s the second-biggest opening for a Colleen Hoover adaptation behind It Ends with Us ($50.0M), and nearly double what Reminders of Him ($18.0M) did in March. It also opened to $30.0M internationally, for $62.6M worldwide. On a $40M budget, this is a great result for Amazon MGM.

The concern is the slightly front loaded weekend and C+ CinemaScore, the lowest for any Hoover film: It Ends with Us had an A-, and Reminders of Him and Regretting You both had a B. While a C+ usually means a quick fade (Fifty Shades of Grey had the same grade and dropped 74% in its second weekend), we don’t think it gets that bad here, as there’s very little aimed at this audience over the next few weeks. Our model has it finishing at $73–81M, and we’re thinking the lower half of that is more likely, somewhere around $70–75M. That would still be way ahead of every Hoover film other than It Ends with Us, and a clear win for theatres and the studio, on that budget.

Unlike Verity, there’s no way to dress this one up. Digger opened to $8.0M in fifth place, below the $10–16M we had on Wednesday and at the bottom of Friday’s $8–10M update, and it’s Tom Cruise’s lowest opening since Lions for Lambs ($6.7M) in 2007. We thought the star power would be enough to keep it over $10M and it wasn’t. It ended up right next to The Bride! ($7.1M in March), a comparison it would’ve really liked to avoid.

There is a little good news in how it played. Saturday was up 18% on the true Friday once you take out the $1.2M in previews, and Sunday’s 23% drop was the smallest in the top ten. Letterboxd (3.80) and IMDb (7.3) like it a lot more than the C+ CinemaScore does too, so maybe there’s a cult classic in the making here. Our model has it at $21–29M, but that leans on comedy legs we don’t see happening here, so we think it ends up easily under $20M. International added $12.0M, for $20.0M worldwide. On a budget of more than $160M, that’s a very tough result for Warner Bros, and will end up as one of the biggest flops of the year. While these swings need to keep getting made (in our opinion), it’s very hard to understand how $160M as a budget could ever be justified. Even at half of that, this would be a big miss, and that at least feels like the kind of budget you can understand being greenlit with this level of talent attached.

After the 62% drop last weekend, this was the hold Resident Evil needed. It fell 46% to $12.5M, right on the 45% we were hoping for, and kept second place ahead of Heart of the Beast. At $124.9M after 17 days it’s about $9M ahead of where Weapons was at the same point, though Weapons got to $151.6M with better holds than this. Our model now has it at $146–159M, and we still think it gets to $150M, even if it’ll be close. Worldwide it’s at $245.4M, just short of the $250M we mentioned in the preview. Either way, it’s a fantastic result on a $75M budget.

We said on Wednesday that anything better than a 50% drop would be a good sign, and Heart of the Beast managed 45%, with $11.0M taking it to $38.4M after ten days. That wasn’t enough to catch Resident Evil, but it pulled further ahead of Primetime, which opened just behind it a week ago. It’s a slightly better second weekend than Ad Astra (-47%), which ended at $50.2M from a similar start, and our model has moved up to $60–68M. That’s a solid run for an older-skewing film, and on an $82M budget it’s getting a lot of help from international, which is already at $60.3M, putting worldwide at about $99M so far.

The B CinemaScore turned out to matter more than we thought. Primetime fell 58% to $8.0M, under the $9–11M we had and a steeper second weekend than Civil War (-56%) or The Drama (-39%). Saturday was up just 26% on Friday, the smallest bump of any holdover in the top ten, and some of that is likely Verity going after the same younger audience and the fact that this is still an A24 film through and through, meaning it’s always going to be a tougher watch for mainstream audiences. It’s still at $34.1M on a $15M budget, and it only needs another $14M to pass The Drama and Talk to Me, which our model ($47–55M) says it does. A great result for A24; they’ve had an amazing year.

We said not to write this one off until the second weekend, and the answer is somewhere in the middle. Forgotten Island dropped 45% to $7.2M, a little under the $8M we were looking for and about the same as Abominable (-42%) and The Wild Robot (-47%) at this point. Saturday nearly doubled Friday, the biggest jump in the top ten, so families are showing up on the weekend. With an A CinemaScore and nothing else for kids until The Cat in the Hat on November 6, it really needs to hold under 40% from here on out to save face and crack $50M domestically. That would be a fine run, even if it’s a long way off its $80M budget.

We expected Endgame to be front-loaded, just not this much. It fell 83% to $4.4M, when we saw it at more like a 65–70% drop. The lifetime total is $894.6M, so $900M is still $5.4M away, and at this rate it may not get there, although Disney could always re-release it on opening night of Doomsday as a double feature to sneak it across that line if they want. Elsewhere, Spider-Man: Brand New Day had the best hold in the top ten at -40% and is up to $954.5M, Practical Magic 2 fell 53% to $64.7M, and The Odyssey lost more than a third of its theaters and dropped 66% to $620.5M.