An awards-hopeful drama seeking an audience of older viewers really does depend on critics' good will in order to succeed at the box office, and "Glass Castle" didn't have it. After a summer of Hollywood complaints about how low RT scores are driving customers away, here at last is some proof. But its reviews have been middling, just 49 percent fresh at RT. "Glass Castle" may have been trolling for awards, with its prestige source material and prestige cast, led by recent Oscar-winner Brie Larson. (Critics gave "Nut Job 2" just a "Rotten" 12 percent at Rotten Tomatoes.) "Nut Job 2" actually got a better CinemaScore grade (B+), and that's still pretty bad for an animated movie. The paradox is that the critics actually liked "Annabelle" better than paying customers, who gave the horror prequel a meh B grade at CinemaScore once they saw it, after being lured to the theater by strong buzz. That, in turn, could explain why older moviegoers came out for this one, since they actually do still read reviews.
New Line, however, actually booked "Annabelle" in film festivals to get positive early buzz among a handful of critics, which then spread among their colleagues. Most horror distributors ignore critics, figuring that they can either avoid screening the film for reviewers or just pay no mind to the reviews because horror fans usually don't care what the critics think. Then again, distributor New Line went out of its way to cultivate their good will. Critics were unusually kind to "Annabelle," giving it a 69 percent "Fresh" at Rotten Tomatoes. Reviews, once again, continue to dictate in part box office spending. Even more surprising was that half of the "Nut Job 2" viewers were over 18, which suggests that the audience contained as many parents as kids. Surprisingly, "Annabelle" skewed older as well, drawing 54 percent of its viewers from the 25-and-over crowd. "Glass Castle" was always going to skew older it's a period piece for a literary audience, one that probably read Walls' book back in 2005 when she published it. Since "Annabelle" was always going to be the strongest draw of these films, it may have drawn much of the female audience that might otherwise have made hits out of the other new releases - and already has, to varying degrees, for holdovers "Girls Trip," "Kidnap," and "Atomic Blonde." These include "Annabelle" (horror movies tend to draw more women than men), comedy " Girls Trip," Halle Berry thriller " Kidnap," "Glass Castle" (an adaptation of Jeannette Walls' best-selling memoir of her Dickensian childhood), and Charlize Theron spy thriller " Atomic Blonde." There's also "Nut Job 2," whose audience turned out to be 57 percent female. Hollywood tends to ignore women audience members at the box office, but at least half of this weekend's top 10 movies feature female stars - or predominantly female casts - and cater to majority-female audiences. How did "Annabelle" manage to pull fans into theaters during a dog-days summer season? Here are some of the factors behind this weekend's good-news-bad-news box office.
("Nut Job 2" earned just $2,232 per screen.) Still, it's pretty weak for a drama that hopes to last long enough to ride into the fall season as an Oscar banner-waver. That's just a tad below predictions, and since it only opened on 1,461 screens, that makes for an okay $3,337 per theater. This despite the fact that there hasn't been an animated hit in months, that kids are still out of school, and that "Nut Job 2" opened on 4,003 screens to become one of the widest independent releases of all time.Īnd then there's wannabe awards hopeful " The Glass Castle," which opened way down in ninth place with an estimated $4.9 million. But its chief rival, cartoon sequel " The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature," opened in third place with only an estimated $8.9 million, underperforming even the most pessimistic predictions.
"Annabelle," the fourth movie in the successful " Conjuring" franchise, performed as well as pundits had predicted.
The other fright was from the chart as a whole, which marked this as the lowest-grossing weekend of an already dismal summer. One came from horror spinoff " Annabelle: Creation," which scared up an estimated $35.0 million in ticket sales to top the box office chart. Hollywood got two truly terrifying frights this weekend.