Paramount Pictures’ “Smile 2,” narrowly outgrossed its predecessor’s opening weekend, making a decent $23M this weekend. Counting overseas ticket sales, and with production costs in the $27M range, the sequel has made back its budget in a single weekend.
These numbers are an improvement over previous tracking numbers which had the “Smile 2” opening at around $20M. No doubt word of mouth spread throughout the weekend, and numbers kept improving from Friday on. It’ll be interesting to see how it holds next weekend.
With the good reviews (85% on Rotten Tomatoes), “Smile 2” could have easily had a $30M weekend if Paramount’s marketing hadn’t been so baffling. The film only had its review embargo lift on Wednesday, just a day before Thursday previews began. They kept a tight lid on this one.
“Smile” (2022) had a budget of $17M and somehow managed to gross $217M worldwide. I gather it’ll be very hard for the sequel to match these numbers. It needs some major legs. Regardless, here’s this weekend’s top 10, via JoBlo.
