Warner Bros.’ The End of Oak Street, which is basically Jurassic Park in the suburbs, opened this weekend with a solid $21 million domestically and another $26 million internationally, giving the sci-fi popcorn blockbuster a $47 million global opening.
That was good enough for third place domestically behind two absolute monsters: Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which remained #1 with $70 million, and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which took second with another $23.2 million.
Considering that competition, I think Oak Street ate pretty well.
The David Robert Mitchell film, starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, was made for a reported $80 million, which is actually fairly modest when you consider the scale of what’s on screen. It’s a big dinosaur blockbuster, but it wasn’t made for Jurassic World money.
Reviews have also been strong, currently sitting at 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, although audiences were a little less enthusiastic with a B CinemaScore. So maybe I’m being overly optimistic about the legs here, but I think word of mouth could keep this one going.
My biggest question is why Warner Bros. opened it here in the first place.
We’re at the tail end of summer, kids are heading back to school, and theaters are incredibly crowded. Spider-Man is a phenomenon, The Odyssey refuses to die, and Oak Street is being asked to fight for oxygen against all of it.
In retrospect, it’s kind of perplexing.
This feels like exactly the kind of original popcorn movie that could have really popped with a cleaner summer release date. Maybe this was always the plan. Maybe Warner Bros. saw this as a smaller play. But now that we’ve actually seen the movie and the response to it, I can’t help wondering what it might have done with a better slot.
Still, $47 million worldwide against an $80 million production budget isn’t a bad place to start. If it holds and eventually performs well enough, maybe there’s even a sequel or some larger universe here. Because, well, that’s what everyone does now.
Meanwhile, there’s another horror-adjacent movie worth watching at the specialty box office.
Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is also killing it at the specialty box office. The MUBI release debuted last weekend with $249,606 from just five theaters, an absolutely killer $49,921 per-theater average. It expanded this weekend and has now pushed its domestic total past $1.1 million, with nearly $1.4 million worldwide to date. Not bad at all for an extremely niche, sexually charged queer slasher that hasn’t even gone wide yet. The real test comes as MUBI continues expanding the film across the country.
The film initially opened August 7 in just a handful of theaters in New York and Los Angeles, with sold-out screenings throughout opening weekend, before expanding into additional markets this weekend. MUBI continues to roll it out into more theaters over the coming weeks.
And I really like this strategy.
Camp Miasma is a very specifically targeted movie, and New York and Los Angeles are obviously ideal markets for it. The real question is whether that word of mouth can carry over as it moves into more of the country.
All I know is I haven’t seen it yet, I’m really fucking excited, and it sucks that I have to wait this long.
But maybe that’s part of the fun.
I kind of miss this.
Who else is planning to see Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma when it finally opens near them?
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