‘Fabelmans' Box-Office is Somewhat Concerning

A few alarming bells rang this weekend with “The Fabelmans” barely matching the same limited release numbers as “TAR” and “The Banshees of Inisherin.” All three films have been critically hailed, and Oscar predicted, but their actual box-office numbers … not so good. Variety had a nice in-depth analysis.

“The Fabelmans” will go wider in a few weeks, and it’s currently tracking at an opening of around $5-7 million dollars. Not earth-shattering, but also not terrible for this kind of movie. It does stand the best chance out of the three titles to do well. However, a major red flag is that Spielberg’s last film, “West Side Story,” bombed at the box office with just $38 million grossed domestically on a $100 million budget.

‘Fabelmans’ made $160k in a total of four locations on the weekend. ‘Wakanda Forever’ actually had a higher per-theater-average. Another comparison, “Decision to Leave” a Korean movie with subtitles. had a slightly lower per-theater-average than Spielberg’s film.

I do wonder if mainstream audiences, some of whom might not be fervent movie history buffs, will be excited enough to go to their local multiplex to watch “The Fabelmans.” My hunch says that they wont. Fact of the matter is that ‘Fabelmans’ will have to heavily rely on word of mouth and Oscar buzz to do well at the box-office. It’s also the kind of movie that has suffered the most in the post-pandemic theatrical era: a personal statement from an auteur without any genre elements.

It seems as though Universal will be very slowly, and deliberately, expanding ‘Fabelmans’ on a week-by-week basis. The goal is to have it play 600 screens by Thanksgiving weekend on November 23rd. ‘Banshees’ and ‘TAR’ had much larger expansions, 1000+ screens, but Spielberg’s film is only set to arrive on VOD in mid-December, so maybe it’ll reach 1000 screens before then.