‘Candyman’ wins box office with $ 9.1 million on Friday

fellow (review) topped the domestic box office yesterday with $ 10 million. MGM and Universal’s R-rated fellow should open with between $ 21 million (if he has legs like Old last month) and $ 24 million (if it works like Visit in 2015 or Don’t breathe in 2016) for the weekend. There was a time when a new fellow suite, directed by Nia DaCosta (Little Woods, The Wonders) and produced by Jordan Peele (Come out, we), was positioned as the horror event of summer 2020. The first trailer dropped in late February 2020 with a lot of buzz and anticipation, but obviously a lot has changed since then.

The bad news is that we still face challenges specific to Covid. The circumstances are probably worse than at the end of May / beginning of June when A quiet place part II ($ 57 million debut / $ 160 million cumulative) and The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It ($ 24 million / $ 65 million) generated relatively ‘business as usual’ gross revenue. Universal made a good faith choice in October 2020 to postpone the film until the end of August 2021, in the hope that more people (especially black viewers) would be vaccinated or otherwise protected against Covid. Like Hollywood’s overall strategy to wait F9 and Black Widow to kick off the ‘blockbuster season’ in late June / early July, which backfired when the Delta variant changed the equation last month.

Any notion fellow would open close Get out ($ 33 ​​million in 2017) or A quiet place ($ 50 million in 2018) expired in March 2020. The, uh, good news (but also very bad) is that the issues that define the fellow franchise have remained relevant. However, a movie like fellow (which plunged head-first into the politics of systemic racism, gentrification, generational trauma, and how even well-meaning whites can exploit stories about black pain) is now a little more up-to-date. price level in 2021 compared to 1992. Bernard Rose fellow was also, at the time, the rare film to take the “Thesilenceofthelambs means horror movies can be for adults again! »Flag and run with it.

Damn, if you allow me to be cynical, sequenced fellow in response to Get out isn’t it much more inspired than redoing Total recall in response to Creation. But I digress, because the arty, claustrophobic, not quite enjoyable (but with a decent B-grade for Cinemascore horror) horror sequel didn’t necessarily open with half of what it did. ‘she would have otherwise caught in June 2020 We may have always watched Get out as a comparison of the best case scenario, as opposed to A quiet place or, haha, We ($ 71 million in 2019). A $ 25 million launch instead of a $ 35 million launch makes fellow another “successful disappointment”, with an emphasis on “successful” as it matched its budget of $ 25 million.

No matter what might have been, it’s a win, especially on a Covid curve. A $ 25 million R-rated horror film starring an almost all-black cast has won overwhelmingly positive reviews (86% fresh and 7.4 / 10 on Rotten Tomatoes despite Film Twitter’s controversial speech) and will pay off around $ 25 million worldwide in its first frame. Again, following the strong legs shown by Old, free guy and Jungle cruise, the mentality of everyone out of the pool after The suicide squad may have been misplaced. There is a clear difference between films that have always been doomed (Snake-eyes) and those that could have broken larger under better circumstances (Jungle cruise). fellow is obviously the latter.