Box Office Week: DUNE sets a new record for WB and HBO MAX's day/date releases with a spicy $40.1 million opening weekend, NO TIME TO DIE crosses the $500 million threshold worldwide, and THE FRENCH DISPATCH breaks pandemic records with a $25,000 per-cinema average during its limited release.

Rank	Title	Domestic Gross (Weekend)	Worldwide Gross (Cume)	Week #	% Change	Budget
1	Dune	$40,100,000	$220,700,000	1	N/A	$165M (but how many solaris is that?)
2	Halloween Kills	$14,500,000	$90,911,845	2	-71%	$20M
3	No Time To Die	$11,886,514	$525,655,599	3	-50%	$250-301M
4	Venom: Let There Be Carnage	$9,100,000	$352,429,631	4	-45%	$110M
5	Ron's Gone Wrong	$7,300,000	$17,300,000	1	N/A	data unavailable

Opening next ⚰️🧟👻🎃🧛 weekend 🧛🎃👻🧟⚰️ : Antlers and Last Night in Soho.

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Notable Box Office Stories

• The question of will Dune flop has been on redditors' minds for months and months (if not years - here's the /r/movies thread from February 2017 when Denis Villeneuve was confirmed to direct the film). It opened in over 30 international markets in mid-September and had crossed the $100 million threshold in worldwide gross by early October, but how well it would perform domestically continued to be the subject of rampant speculation - until now. Dune (or should I say ᑐ ᑌ ᑎ ᕮ) opened in the US and Canada to $40.1 million this weekend, the highest opening weekend gross of any Warner Brothers / HBO MAX day-date release (and indeed a higher gross than WB's last four releases combined). This is quite good for a film that as late as Friday afternoon was still projected to open in the range of $30 million domestically. It is also the highest domestic opening weekend of any Denis Villeneuve film - having grossed roughly $7 million more than Blade Runner 2049 which opened to just under $33 million in 2017 (/u/mi-16evil wrote about it at the time), and nearly doubling the $20-25 million domestic opening weekends for Arrival (chart) and Prisoners (chart).

• The other major market in which Dune opened this weekend was China - where it grossed just under $22 million (or 140 million RMB) to open at #2 behind the Chinese film 长津湖 (The Battle at Lake Changjin). Until box office juggernaut Lake Changjin (which is currently within striking distance of fellow 2021 Chinese film 你好, 李焕英 (Hi, Mom)'s position as the highest-grossing film of the year worldwide) starts to wind down its performance, it may be some time before Dune or any foreign-language film takes the top spot at the Chinese box office. That being said, Dune's performance in China may be affected by its 8.0 score on movie website Maoyan (/u/chanma50 explained on /r/boxoffice what Maoyan ratings generally indicate) and also by No Time To Die opening next weekend.

• Other notable stories... The box office will clearly be dying another day for No Time To Die - which crossed the $500 million threshold worldwide this weekend (and, along with F9, is only the second English-language film to gross over $500 million since late 2019), and crossed the $100 million threshold at the UK box office. As previously mentioned, it opens in China next weekend (alongside its release in Australia in mid-November) and has a very good chance of outperforming the worldwide box office of Daniel Craig's first two Bond films. Aaand it was a pretty good weekend to be Timothée Chalamet as Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch grossed $1.3 million domestically with an average of $25,000 per cinema - an average higher than any other film released during the COVID-19 pandemic! The film goes into a wider release next weekend.

Films Reddit Wants to Follow

This is a segment where we keep a weekly tally of currently showing films that aren't in the Top 5 that fellow redditors want updates on. If you'd like me to add a film to this chart, make a comment in this thread.

Last time /u/121jigawatts requested that we follow the performance of Dune once it drops out of the Top 5.

Title	Domestic Gross (Weekend)	Worldwide Gross (Cume)	Week #	% Change	Budget

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As always /r/boxoffice is a great place to share links and other conversations about box office news; you can also view the archive of all Box Office Week posts at /r/moviesboxoffice.

Submitted October 25, 2021 at 07:00PM by GetFreeCash https://ift.tt/3m9AedU