Spider-Man: Brand New Day finished number one at the box office for the third consecutive weekend, but it did face much stiffer competition in this cycle as Insidious: Out of the Further ended its consecutive day streak at the top of the box office prematurely.
Brand New Day grossed an approximated $39M domestically this weekend, putting it $2.2B globally as it sits less than $150M shy of $1B domestic. No film has ever reached that mark as Rise of Skywalker sits at the highest-domestic gross in history with $936M. This film has already passed Spider-Man: No Way Home to become the highest-grossing Spider-Man film ever, but its legs continue to be astronimical overseas. $2.8B might not be out of the question right now.
The pillow fort scene in Insidious: Out of the Further. (Photo credit: Sony)
Out of the Further had a great opening for what it is. While technically not a spin-off as they brought back Lin Shaye’s Elise to tie the films together, the film does deviate from the Lambert family it’s been following since it’s 2010 breakthrough. This allowed it, however, to firmly become its own film and expand the lore of the world without bogging itself down in the familial melodrama, sticking to the basics of horror. Unfortunatey, its C- CinemaScore and 2.8 Letterboxd score don’t exactly encourage its word-of-mouth. There are a few scenes, notably a scene in the daughter’s pillow fort and a scene at a dentist office, that do really well creating an atmospheric environment, though the rest of the film struggles in that regard, and ultimately that’s what makes or breaks a horror film.
Regardless, the $25M domestic opening is a respectable figure. While this opened lower than The Last Key or The Red Door, it did open higher than the third film and doubled the opening of the original. It was evident from tracking that the lack of Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson in this one after bringing them back the last time out hurt, though clearly the story with them is finished, and Byrne getting more prestige roles makes it unlikely for her to revisit Renai. At a $60M global opening, Sony is already profitable thanks to its tight $18M budget. As long as these movies continue opening higher than their budget and continue to be cost efficient to make, they’ll keep coming. That’s why horror does so well.
Speaking of affordable horror, while it didn’t chart this week domestically, Obsession continued its international run. You might recall that last week in the DSR BOR we touched on the fact that Obsession was on the verge of topping Elemental to become the highest-grossing original film of the decade. Having now made in a surplus of $500M, it has become the first original of the 2020s to break the $500M mark globally, and only the third horror film ever, alongside Andy Muschietti’s It and M. Night’s breakout hit The Sixth Sense.
Nobody’s using their One Wish Willow on a killer clown or to see dead people, but it’s intriguing that this is the film that reached the milestone. While there’s certainly been breakout horror hits like Sinners and Weapons in recent years, it’s hard to argue against those films being predominantly about the American experience. Sinners follows a pair of colored twins in the Jim Crow South which is inherently an American story, while Weapons has a lot of social commentary on the systemic issue in contemporary U.S.A. on school shootings and the trauma that comes with it in its allegorical nature. Obsession, however, was able to soar higher not because it was more fresh, but that the experience is more universal. What would you do if you had the power to wish that your unrequited love returned the favor? That’s a universal phenomenon no matter what culture you’re part of, what generation you were born in, and no matter what your background is. That’s before you consider this is the year Gen-Z went to the theatres, and a lot of the contemporary commentary on dating is a uniquely Gen-Z struggle, thus fostering an environment where the movie can speak to everybody and thus make more money abroad, but loudest to the highest-spending consumer demographic.
Audiences are obsessed with Obsession, and it’s sub-$1M budget and mere $15M acquisition cost make it the box office story of the year. However, there are rumors that is not the film that most outperformed its budget this year as China has released a $200, yes, two-hundred-dollar, film that became a meme in the country and has made over $4M. While the idea of a meme generating $4M in admissions to be in on the joke certainly passes the smell test, it’s worth noting that this is not a verified number. Much like Ne Zha 2 making $2B last year despite not being a hit in literally any other country, this isn’t a number we buy into at the Box Office Report. The reason is that every major film market in the world does third-party verification as a country except for China. The only numbers that are verified through a third party system for China are films from other countries, such as Hollywood, as the studios go through the verification processes themselves to follow local regulations. The Chinese government subsidizes the Chinese film industry, and then reports the numbers on their films with the information they want out there. We at DSR will not be allowing a country that is renown for their propaganda machine to determine the information they will not let other people verify, and therefore call bullshit on this story.
One film that did rank this week, finishing at third, also made history. The Odyssey, which is still making around $20M per weekend over a month into its theatrical run, has now made $1.4B. That means it is officially the highest-grossing R-Rated film in history. The legs should continue to run considering its dominance on the IMAX screen, but its theatrical exclusivity isn’t over until November 17th. This marks a full four months between its debut and it’s PVOD release, the first film since Oppenheimer to go that long as its director, who also famously made Oppenheimer, continues to be adamant that you watch his films on the big screen. If this follows the same timeline as Oppenheimer did, its streaming release wouldn’t even be until the middle of February. We at the DSR BOR have been disucssing the Odyssey for so long that checking out previous editions of the Box Office Report is solid enough coverage. Those can be found here. It looks, though, like $1.7B for the Odyssey is locked. Suffice to say, it didn’t come close to underperfoming, no matter how much the richest man on the planet tried to make it so.
The two dino films we discussed in detail last week are still neck and neck, but at just ~$9M. This represents drops in the fifties, a brutal result for a summer blockbuster and a family film. Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie should be more than okay considering its microscopic budget and the idea that it’ll have family legs and strong international performance, but this is a disastrous result for Warner Bros for End of Oak Street, and the studio desperately needs a win before Dune Part 3.
The remainder of the top ten, if you include the Fast and Furious rerelease as new, are all newcomers. New Jason Statham flick Mutiny, which is seemingly your traditional Statham fare, opened to aroud $7M. This is an underperformance for Lionsgate as it comes with a $90M breakeven point that it likely won’t reach on such a muted opening. Its international performance is currently unreported, so we’ll see how that aids it. That said, the story of the box office for Mutiny won’t be Lionsgate, rather Amazon. Amazon dropped the movie on Prime for free before it even released theatrically despite its contracts forbidding that, and this is likely to bring a lawsuit that making it available on home video for free cost them a significant amount of money opening weekend. While Statham’s films have been earning less and less for a while, we don’t suggest looking at the Shelter box office from earlier this year if you enjoyed the film, this should be more than enough to get Amazon to settle out of court and turn the movie profitable. It is worth noting that The Beekeeper was not only the only Statham film to turn a profit since the hugely successful Meg sequel, but it’s the only one to make at least $100M at the box office, and that includes an Expendables film. The saving grace for Statham is that even without a profit theatrically, the films generally have smaller budgets and are very successful on streaming, which should allow his work to still get made as they post more than strong enough ancillary performances to justify the expense. Is it that people don’t care for Statham anymore, or just that they’ve seen so many Statham movies that the films no longer feel like something you have to prioritize seeing? For now, the argument should clearly be that it’s the latter.
Tony, Spa Weekend, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma round out the top ten this week. Tony, the Anthony Bourdain biopic, focuses strictly on the summer he worked in a kitchen while trying to become a writer, rather serve as a Wikipedia page in film form. Dominic Sessa and Antonio Banderas both give excellent performances, but an A24 awards play rarely means massive box office. With a smaller budget and a sale of the overseas distribution rights, it should do fine regardless, though we at the DSR BOR highly recommended checking it out, and I have a quick review on my Letterboxd which are generally linked at the end of all of my articles. Spa Weekend clearly tried hard to reach the female demographic, but it being dead on arrival is simply likely because it looked like it tried too hard to be funny.
For Camp Miasma, a movie we also recommend, it’s a little more complicated. For starters, I don’t think that a movie that starts its title with ‘Teenage Sex’ is a movie I want to put into my algorithm by googling showtimes for, much less unironically walk up to the box office and ask the attendant ‘one ticket for teenage sex, please.’ I think they stifled themselves with the title name. I also think the polarization of 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow' made a lot of peopel apprehensive to come back for Jane Schoenbrun’s next project. But the biggest issue at the end of the day is that MUBI is still selling its success of The Substance to independent filmmakers that they can make their movies massive hits, and as of now, the only outlier in MUBI’s distribution history is The Substance, and that rode the ‘we love Demi Moore, welcome back’ wave. MUBI tried to market this as that same thing for Gillian Anderson, and while people like the X-Files, there’s a reason why while Anderson was doing TV work Demi Moore was the highest paid actress in Hollywood. She’s just a different caliber star. Regardless, Camp Miasmi is doing excellent with critics, and should get Schoenbrun more looks.
Twelve films made at least $1M at the box office this weekend. We have a Greek mythology epic, an original dinosaur adventure, family films, an elevated slasher, a biopic about a celebrity chef, a comic book film, a Statham action flick, and another installment in a beloved horror franchise. The box office is very healthy in 2026.
But can it be healthy next weekend? We finally get the long-awaited wide release of Coyote vs. Acme. While people are certainly aware of this film, the BOR isn’t exactly expecting huge numbers after a similar situation happened with The Day the Earth Blew Up and the author of this article was the only person who actually went out of his way to see it. It has a great concept, but how familiar is the younger generation with the concept? The zeitgeist hasn’t kept the Acme Company in the vernacular this century and Looney Tunes as an IP isn’t what it used to be. It looks promising quality wise, and we hope it can be a sleeper hit, but we don’t expect it to be. We’ll comment more on this next week.
The big release next week we also don’t feel confident in, but still could be a sleeper hit if it has good word-of-mouth, which is kind of what determines the performance of a Ridley Scott movie these days. The 88-year-old auteur behind Alien, Bladerunner, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, and The Martian is also the auteur behind the recent All the Money in the World, House of Gucci, Napoleon, and Gladiator II. We’ll have more information to analyze next week. Needless to say, this is a big test for the star power of Jacob Elordi post-Euphoria.
Jameus Mooney is an entertainment writer for Comicbook Clique, having covered the entertainment industry for years. You can follow him on Twitter here, and Letterboxd here. You can also listen to his horror podcast, The 2:17 Horror Podcast, at the DeathArts XIII YouTube channel.