With Halloween falling on a Sunday this year, the box office was always going to take a serious tumble when people will be a lot more likely to spend their time throwing on a costume and heading to a party than taking a trip to their local multiplex, especially given the lack of fresh horror content.
As expected, it’s set to be a fairly weak frame this weekend, with Denis Villenueve’s Dune set to comfortably stave off any notable competition. As per Deadline, the sci-fi epic and official first half of a two-part trilogy is on track to bring in roughly $15 million over the three days, but Friday numbers are down an alarming 71% from seven days ago.
Halloween Kills should easily retain second place despite the horror genre typically being very front-loaded, while My Hero Academia: World Heroes’ Mission is as close to a lock for third place as you can get, with Funimation predicting around $8 million by the end of play on Sunday.
Genre aficionados haven’t been making their presence felt, though, with Edgar Wright’s psychological thriller Last Night in Soho and Scott Cooper’s supernatural chiller Antlers projected to just about make it past the $4 million barrier, once again proving that titles geared towards older audiences that don’t come with built-in name recognition have suffered more than most during the pandemic.