The Invitation wins at the Box Office

8-29-22

It wasn't the worst weekend of the year. That belongs to Jan. 28-30, when all titles made $34.9M, per Box Office Mojo. After all, it’s late August. A majority of kids are back in school (Comscore says 32% K-12 were out Friday, with 38% colleges on break),

It was a quiet weekend at the theaters this past weekend. In fact, it was downright bleak. But there's no need to panic. The results were totally expected as the late summer is generally slower. As expected, box office tickets dropped 34% from last weekend and became the year’s third lowest grossing at the box office. Three wide releases led a skimpy $52.1 million, making this the worst weekend since January and the first weekend since May 2021 where no film grossed over $10 million.

When all else fails, horror often wins in down times at the box office. The Invitation took the top spot this weekend with $7 million from 3,114 locations. The studio can be happy just the same.

This isn’t a bad opening for this $10 million budgeted film. The news of the slowdown at the box office comes as no surprise. The big titles have already come and gone with Top Gun:Maverick and Bullet Train doing surprisingly well over the entire summer.

Click the link below to learn more

Things are certianly likely to bounce back with a strong fall and winter. The fourth quarter will feature fllms starring Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween Ends; Julia Roberts and George Clooney in Ticket to Paradise.

Theres also Dwayne Johnson, Pierce Brosnan, and Viola Davis in Black Adam; Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, and Sir Anthony Hopkins in Armageddon Time; Margot Robbie, Christian Bale, and Robert De Niro in Amsterdam; Tom Hanks in A Man Called Otto; Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie in Babylon. Then theres the highly- anticipated sequels to Black Panther, Shazam!, and Avatar.”

These are films that have a build-in audience of loyal fans and most of these films feature superstars at the top of thise respective crafts.

In other movie-related news, for the first time in their company’s history, Imax achieved three consecutive $25M-plus global openings with Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Top Gun: Maverick, and Jurassic World Dominion. Imax also reported a year-to-date domestic box office through June that trailed 2019 only by 5 percent, especially significant given that 2019 holds the record for Imax’s best year ever.