Warner Bros./DC's "Clayface" landed exactly where it was tracking, pulling in $3.5M from Thursday previews. Better yet, the fans who turned out seem to have liked what they saw: the film earned 4½ stars on PostTrak and a 94% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Weekend projections are now in the $20M–$23M range domestically, with a $45M worldwide start. That's not bad for a film that cost $44M to produce. This isn't a $200M tentpole that needs a $100M opening to justify itself. It's a leaner, smaller-scale DC bet.
The real story this weekend, though, is "You Can See Everything." A24's documentary, co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, opened to a fantastic $15.6M last weekend, an almost unheard-of number for a non-fiction film. It followed that with strong midweek business, ranking #1 every day from Monday to Thursday and taking in $2.2M on Thursday. It now expands from 855 locations to 2,600 on Friday, and everyone will be watching how well it holds.
As for last weekend's #1, "Street Fighter," expect a 65% drop, likely because word of mouth just isn't that positive.
Black Bear's Sundance acquisition "Wicker" opened to $620K in previews across 1,471 locations. That's soft, especially for a film with 92% from critics and 93% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. I didn't like this movie at all.
Things look far worse for Taika Waititi's feature adaptation of "Klara and the Sun." Sony had already cut its rollout from 1,900 screens to roughly 800, and it managed just $85K in previews. Yikes. The budget was around $20M.
That said, the most painful number of the weekend may belong to Laika's stop-motion "Wildwood," released through Fathom. Previews came in around $1M, on 2930+ screens, and $8M–$9M for the weekend looks like the best case. The film has a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 98% audience score, and it carries a budget of more than $100M.
That sets up a real fight for #1 this weekend between "Clayface" and "You Can See Everything." If Fielder's documentary holds strong in its expansion, it has a legitimate shot at beating a DC movie, and that's a sentence nobody expected to write this year. For now, my bet is on "Clayface" winning by $1M or $2M.
Jaume Collet-Serra is directing, which makes perfect sense. He's the guy who turned "Carry-On" — a script that sat on a shelf for 11 years — into Netflix's third most-watched film ever.