‘Women Talking’ Makes Awful $52,000 in Limited Release

Here’s something absolutely nobody is talking about. Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking” was released in eight locations this weekend and it’s looking like a $40K three-day, $53K four-day total. The film was released in NYC, LA, Toronto, Austin and Chicago. That’s pretty awful.

You’d think Oscar buzz and a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes would mean something, not to mention a cast that includes Rooney Mara, Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley, but forget about it. Nobody wants to watch a stagey movie centered on women, from an isolated religious community, coming to terms with being raped.

… or you can just do what most pundits have done this morning and lay the blame on bad weather. Yeah, let’s just blame it on bad weather. However, barely anybody is blaming Babylon’s atrocious $3.4 million weekend on bad weather, somehow “Women Talking” had its numbers severely affected by snow, but not “Babylon”.

I don’t know what to tell you folks. It just seems as though every Oscar contender this fall has failed miserably at the box-office. Even “The Whale” is now looking at a terrible overall gross — it made $900k this weekend, despite playing in close to 700 theaters.

IFC’s “Corsage” actually did better than expected in limited release, it topped Women Talking’s PSA average. The three-day estimate for the Cannes-heralded biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria – known as Sisi — was $36k, a PSA of $18k.