‘Whalefall’ Sinks at the Box Office While ‘The Devils’ Finds Its Renaissance
Another cluttered weekend for horror at the box office, yet plenty of films are still finding success. Even on the […]
Another cluttered weekend for horror at the box office, yet plenty of films are still finding success. Even on the darker side, a 55-year-old NC-17 movie managed to pull in more money per theater than Disney’s expensive new survival thriller.
There are a few different stories worth digging into from the October 16–18 weekend, and the biggest disappointment belongs to Whalefall. The 20th Century Studios release opened to an estimated $8 million domestically, adding $9.5 million internationally for a $17.5 million worldwide start against a reported $60 million production budget. That’s a whale-sized disappointment.
The marketing felt generic and lackluster. It never built toward opening weekend, and I’m still trying to understand the decision to release this movie in October. Yes, Brian Duffield’s film traps Austin Abrams (Weapons, Resident Evil) inside a whale for a claustrophobic, tense, and surprisingly violent ordeal. But it’s also a dramatic thriller laced with horror, with a substantial emotional story about a father and son.
To me, this was a summer release. May, June, July. Even August would have made sense. Dropping it into an overcrowded October, when audiences are specifically hunting down horror movies, feels perplexing in retrospect. I wonder whether its more heartfelt approach will deliver what those audiences were expecting, although its B CinemaScore suggests a better initial response than the opening numbers might imply.
Our own Matt Konopka gave it 3.5 out of 5 in his review, praising Abrams’ “engaging vulnerability” while finding that the pacing and CG weakened the experience.
And then there’s The Devils.
Ken Russell’s 1971 masterpiece returned through Warner Bros. Clockwork in its restored NC-17 director’s cut and earned $1.64 million from just 350 theaters. That’s a $4,686 per-theater average, compared with Whalefall’s $2,610 across 3,065 locations.
This is so rad because this notoriously censored early ’70s film, now playing with an NC-17 rating, nearly s PER average. That’s a fantastic result for this kind of repertory release.
