Box-Office: ‘Coyote vs. Acme’ Eyes $17M+ Opening After $1.7M Thursday; ‘The Dog Stars’ Bombs With $850K

Two new releases, two wildly different stories.

Let’s start with “Coyote vs. Acme,” almost deleted by Warner Bros., saved by Ketchup for $50M, and now a sleeper hit? Tracking sat in the single digits three weeks ago, and now, with a $1.7M Thursday, it’s climbing toward a $17M weekend!

The Dave Green-directed live-action/animated hybrid is being boosted by incredibly strong reviews, including a 77 on Metacritic and 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. What an embarrassment for Warner Bros., and especially CEO David Zaslav, who was incredibly adamant about canceling the film as a $30M tax write-off.

That said, Ketchup might have overpaid in acquiring the film. $50M is a lot. They also spent $10M in P&A marketing, which honestly isn’t that much—the innumerable amount of articles written about the movie this week has helped a lot, including a lengthy report in The New York Times.

One movie that isn’t doing well at all is Ridley Scott’s “The Dog Stars,” starring Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin, which has been battered by bad reviews, sitting at 40% on Rotten Tomatoes, and made only $850K on Thursday.

The weekend tally looks bleak for “Dog Stars”: $8-9M, and that’s against a budget that’s still unconfirmed. The trades want us to believe it was $70-$80M, but Peter Heller, whose novel the film is based on, recently mentioned that the film cost $110M.

Regardless, whether it’s $70M or $110M, this film is going to bomb. And yet Scott continues on, despite coming off “Napoleon” and “Gladiator II,” as he’s currently in pre-production on another high-budget epic, “Treasure Island,” starring Hugh Jackman and produced by Sony.

One last thing—watch out for “The Odyssey” ($2.3M) this weekend. Based on the Thursday numbers, it might even, maybe, who knows, come close to overtaking “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” ($2.8M) atop the box office in its seventh weekend of release.