As predicted, Dune dunks on the competition at the weekend box office

Halloween Kills also suffers an all-too-predictable fall while The French Dispatch breaks a surprising record

By Sam Barsanti  |  October 24, 2021 | 10:46pm
Aux News Dune
As predicted, Dune dunks on the competition at the weekend box office
Dune Photo: Warner Bros.

After making a respectable $17.5 million on Friday, Denis Villeneuve’s adult Star Wars movie Dune seemed poised to make about $35 million this weekend—enough to run away with the top spot on the charts, even if it wasn’t going to break any records. Now, with the weekend more or less over (sorry), we know that the estimates actually underestimated: Dune actually made about $40 million.

That was enough to soar over last week’s winner, Halloween Kills, despite both movies being available on streaming platforms (Dune is on HBO Max, Halloween Kills is on Peacock), and possibly enough to put it on pace to quickly lap Halloween Kills as well. That latest movie to suggest that there’s something supernaturally powerful about Michael Myers while also insisting that it’s a grounded story that takes place in something akin to the real world fell hard this week, dropping 70 percent and making only $14 million for a total of $73 million after two weeks.

We suggested that Halloween might drop this week, since that has been the case for most of these mid-pandemic movies that launch on streaming services (we keep bringing this up every week, but that’s what happened to Black Widow). There’s no reason to also think it won’t happen to Dune, but we’ll see. People really want that sequel.

Elsewhere on the charts, No Time To Die made $11 million (for a total of $120 million), Venom: Let There Be Carnage landed at $9 (for a total of $181 million), and newcomer Ron’s Gone Wrong made only $7.3 million. The Last Duel continues to do poorly, adding only $2.1 million and sitting at a two-week total of only $8.5 million.

The other big story on the charts concerns the only other big newcomer: Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch. The movie only made $1.3 million, which is almost nothing, but it did that on only 52 theaters. That’s a $25,000 per-screen average, which is bananas these days, and it’s easily enough to set a per-screen record for during the pandemic. To illustrate that, Dune opened on over 4,000 screens and had an average of nearly $10,000, and in the record-breaking weekend where Venom 2 opened at $90 million, it only got to a $21,000 per-screen average.

The full top 10 list is below, and for a more detailed breakdown of the numbers, walk (without rhythm) over to Box Office Mojo.

  • Dune
  • Halloween Kills
  • No Time To Die
  • Venom: Let There Be Carnage
  • Ron’s Gone Wrong
  • The Addams Family 2
  • The Last Duel
  • Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings
  • The French Dispatch
  • Honsla Rakh

 
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