"This weekend was like some weird alternative box-office universe," said Paul Dergarabedian of Comscore to THR, noting that year-to-date box office revenue continues to trail behind 2018 by 5.5 percent.
“Doctor Sleep,” the sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” was projected to open with a $25-30 million tally this past weekend at the box-office. That didn’t happen. In fact, the Veterans Day box office became a bloody metaphor for the vast indifference many audiences have had with sequels this year. As winter starts to creep into the Northeast, in the form of snowstorms and chilly weather, more and more people may rather stay home and stream Netflix content than go to the movies and watch another irrelevant sequel we didn’t need.
The R-rated horror thriller instead opened with a comatose $14.1 million domestic tally and lost to Roland Emmerich's big-budget spectacle “Midway,” which took in $17.5 million (on a $45 million budget). Let’s also not forget that just last weekend, “Terminator: Dark Fate.” bombed as well and performed below expectations. Sequel fatigue? Quite possibly.
As THR reports, “Warners was so keen on Doctor Sleep that movie studio chief Toby Emmerich had already struck a deal with director Mike Flanagan and his Intrepid Pictures to script a sequel whose working title is Hallorann, drawn from the character who appears in both The Shining and Doctor Sleep.”
Warner Bros. must surely be having a blue Monday as they try to decipher what went wrong. Also, that planned sequel to “Doctor Sleep”? Yeah, that will surely be put on hold now, or totally scrapped, considering it just wouldn’t make any business sense to greenlight such a project with the numbers “Doctor Sleep” nabbed yesterday.
Here’s the domestic top 10 for November 8 to November 10:
1. Midway – $17.5M (Debut)
2. Doctor Sleep – $14.1M (Debut)
3. Playing with Fire – $12.8M (Debut)
4. Last Christmas – $11.6M (Debut)
5. Terminator: Dark Fate – $10.8M ($48.4M Overall)
6. Joker – $9.2M ($313.4M)
7. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil – $8M ($97.3M)
8. Harriet – $7.2M ($23.4M)
9. Zombieland: Double Tap – $4.3M ($66.6M)
10. The Addams Family – $4.2M ($91M)