‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Stays No. 1, ‘Speak No Evil’ Impresses, ‘Killer’s Game’ Bombs
Conservative provocateur Matt Walsh’s mockumentary Am I Racist? scores the third-biggest opening for a documentary in the past decade.
Playing in 4,575 theaters domestically, the picture fell just 54 percent for a 10-day domestic total of $188 million.
Overseas, the sequel took in another $28.7 million from 76 markets for a lukewarm foreign tally of $76.3 million and $264.3 million globally.
Blumhouse and Universal’s new horror-thriller Speak No Evil was also good news for the early fall box office. The pic opened in second place with an estimated $11.5 million from 3,375 locations against a budget of just $15 million before marketing.
The movie follows an American family as they spend the weekend at a plush British estate only to discover that their host, played by James McAvoy, has a rather sinister side.
Marvel and Disney’s Deadpool & Wolverineheld at No. 3 all the way in its eighth weekend, with an estimated $5.2 million for domestic cumulative of $621.5 million and $1.305 billion worldwide, the seventh-biggest showing of any MCU title.
In the weekend’s biggest surprise, conservative provocateur Matt Walsh‘s Am I Racist? opened in fourth place with estimated $4.8 million from 1,517 locations, the top debut of 2024 so far for a doc and the third biggest of the past decade.
Am I Racist? is doing big business in conservative markets in the South, Midwest and Mountain States.
In the film, which is drawing comparisons to Borat, Walsh tricks his subjects by assuming the role of a DEI trainee who attends anti-racism workshops, crashes private intellectual dinner parties and conducts sit-down interviews with experts and everyday Americans alike on the topic of racism (some of those events were reportedly organized by the filmmakers).
The film also discloses the fees paid to certain experts, including Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. In recent days, DiAngelo blasted Walsh and said she had donated her $15,000 fee to the NAACP.
Ronald Reagan biopic Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid, rounded out the top five with $3 million from 2,450 cinemas in its third weekend for a domestic total of $23.3 million through Sunday.
The casualty of the weekend was Lionsgate’s new actioner The Killer’s Game, starring Dave Bautsta as a veteran hitman who orders a contract for his own murder after being mistakenly diagnosed with a terminal condition. The R-rated movie came in sixth place with a dismal $2.6 million from 2,623 theaters after earning poor reviews and a B+ CinemaScore from audiences.
