Every movie, even the best ones, eventually fall from the #1 spot.
These dim theater days it only takes $3.6 million for the weekend box office to be #1. That honor has been Tenet’s for weeks, but this last weekend it goes to Robert De Niro and company with The War With Grandpa.
Despite the loss of more than 500 Regal Theaters, total grosses went up this weekend. Led by newcomer “The War with Grandpa,” the top 10 grossed about $9.7 million. That’s up from $8.5 million last weekend. With so many library titles adding to the pot, the full take might reach $13 million. By comparison. 2019 saw $141 million on Columbus Day weekend.
Tenet No Longer #1 as The War With Grandpa Wins Weekend Box Office | IndieWire
Meanwhile, Stephen King went to theaters Saturday night — lucky guy that he was able to patronize an open theater in his area, ours are all closed around here until this Friday — and the king of horror felt “terrible for the film industry.”
Low box office sales are scaring studios in all kinds of bad ways right now, but even so, War With Grandpa showed people are still attending movies in theaters.
We will be this coming weekend too.
Movies, Movies, Movies 
And I’m going to a screening on Monday. But let’s be clear, this isn’t a worldwide problem with cinema, this is a problem about content delivery caused by the US not getting the pandemic under control, strangling the release of blockbuster films and killing it for everyone. Although Cineworld have temporarily closed in the UK, other chains remain open at weekends, and still it’s the best place to forget about the pandemic. But there’s no way this can be sustainable for long if at all…
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I don’t mention often enough that I’m primarily speaking about domestic (US-only) that is impacting the world at large cinema-wise.
Internationally Tenet sales have been dramatically better than they have been in the states.
And the funny thing is it isn’t even all the states where this cinema thing is a huge issue, it’s New York, that’s still closed and part of California. If those had opened, then Regal would not have closed all their theaters. So, it’s almost like the theater business in the United States is based on New York and California and whatever the rest of us moviegoers do in other states, us included, since we live in Washington state, doesn’t matter that much in the bigger picture.
In a similar way, what happens in the United States is impacting the cinemas worldwide. Crazy that two big states in America would have such an impact on worldwide cinema as it stands, but that seems to be truly what’s going on here when we laser focus on things.
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Agreed on all points. So urban areas have more virus to contend with, and that means that distribs/studios don’t want to release work that will gain a fraction of their expected recoup. But the US has had a stranglehold on cinema worldwide for more than half a century until now; you can bet that it’ll take years if not decades to get that back. This isn’t making America great again, it’s actively destroying America as a cultural and financial force…
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America is a large place and it’s much larger than California and New York. I imagine the same is of U.K. that not the biggest cities are where it’s at, but that’s merely a guess on my part. I’ve been to Canada (my sister lives there) and Mexico and that’s as far as my international travel in life so far goes.
Would love to get to Europe, Australia, Japan and some other international countries. Switzerland maybe. So many travel possibilities abroad to extend the world view outside of America. But within America there are so many diverse places to travel and visit. New York and California are really just the tip of the iceberg.
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And since Stephen King lives (primarily) in Bangor Maine his state isn’t big business for theaters either. He also owns a house in Florida and they’re a bigger cinema force, undoubtedly but it’s still not the bigger media hubs of New York and California.
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