Avengers Encore Leads $122M Box Office Anomaly — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Avengers Endgame: Encore opened at #1 with $26M in 3,060 theaters, earning a 91% positive score on PostTrak and drawing a dominant 66% 18-34 audience, with Imax/Infinity Vision screens driving 60% of the take.
- Resident Evil held second place with $23.3M (-61% drop), pushing its 10-day domestic total to $103.4M and putting it on track to surpass director Zach Cregger's previous film 'Weapons' ($151.5M final).
- Heart of the Beast (Paramount/Brad Pitt) debuted at $20M in third, beating NRG forecasts of $18M with an A- CinemaScore and surprising over-45 turnout at nearly 50%, despite the $82M net production budget.
- Primetime (A24/Robert Pattinson) opened at $19.1M, beating pre-weekend tracking of $12-16M but falling short of rivals' $20M hopes, with Gen-Z driving 70% under-30 attendance and 188M social media reach across platforms.
- Forgotten Island (DreamWorks Animation) earned $12.8M with an A CinemaScore and 83% definite recommend, with Asian American audiences leading at 40% of turnout.
- The domestic box office year-to-date is on the verge of crossing $8 billion — a milestone not reached until December last year — with post-Covid best 2023 finishing at $9B and last year ending at $8.87B.
- Distribution executives described four films clearing $20M+ as a "statistical anomaly," with the $122M weekend falling just short of 2015's Hotel Transylvania 2-led $137.8M frame as the best late September on record.
Why it matters: The marketplace is defying late-September seasonal expectations: four wide releases cleared near or above $20M simultaneously, pushing domestic YTD toward $8B weeks earlier than last year and signaling that counter-programming — not just tentpoles — can still drive turnout. The combination of a legacy re-release, horror holdover, awards-season hopeful, A24 crime drama, and family animation all delivering simultaneously is unusual and points to broader audience demand rather than any single hit carrying the frame.
Ask SkimNews
