TAGGED AS: Box Office, movies, news
Horror fans had their choice this weekend. One of the legends returned to his roots and had his best non-Marvel or storybook opening. A YouTuber adapted a video game and tripled its budget twice. Then a MeToo’d filmmaker returned after a decade in exile to create a documentary about the current First Lady.
Director Sam Raimi has three Evil Dead films to his name, as well as three Spider-Mans, a Doctor Strange, and even a Wizard of Oz movie. Those latter five are responsible for $3.94 billion and change at the global box office. Much more of his storied career has been devoted to other genre and character-driven dramas, with his most successful among them coming with his return to horror in 2009 with Drag Me To Hell ($15.8 million opening, $42.1 million domestic, $90.8 million worldwide). His latest with Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien could prove to be a new high.
Send Help opened to $20 million this weekend and represents the fifth Raimi film to register over 90% on the Tomatometer, including the first two Spider-Man movies, Drag Me To Hell, and A Simple Plan. Only six films have opened in January to over $19 million and failed to reach $50 million, including Texas Chainsaw 3-D, which opened to $21.7 million, as well as Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, Notorious (2009), xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, The Unborn (2009), and Hostel. Send Help is an original picture whose boost throughout the weekend suggests solid word-of-mouth beyond just the genre fans. It should easily best Drag Me To Hell’s numbers, and if this can pierce $100 million globally, 20th Century Studios can declare victory. Globally it has made $28.1 million so far.
We now come to the story that is Amazon/MGM’s release of the documentary Melania in 1,778 theaters nationwide. Troubled director Brett Ratner was handpicked to make the film, his first theatrical release since 2014’s Hercules, which capped off a string of losers, including Tower Heist, Rush Hour 3, X-Men: The Last Stand, and After the Sunset. Now that the resume is out of the way, let’s get to the headline: Is it really one of the best documentary openings of all-time, or even “in years?”
If we are counting (and we should) concert films and behind-the-scenes releases over the years, Melania does not make the top 10, coming up behind Disney’s Nature docs Chimpanzee ($10.6 million) and Earth ($8.8 million), as well as 2023’s BTS: Yet to Come in Cinemas ($8.0 million). By simple calendar metrics, Melania’s $7 million start is the best documentary opening since Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of Life of a Showgirl, which played for three days only and grossed $34 million over the weekend of October 3, 2025. Which means that Melania is the best documentary opening not “in years” but “since last October,” or nearly four months.
Let’s also look at another positive headline some are running with: its A Cinemascore. Getting that kind of grade for a four-quadrant release like Avatar: Fire and Ash or Wicked: For Good is not a guarantee. Getting it for Sinners or One Battle After Another is even more impressive. Getting that grade from a limited, niche audience on opening weekend is not. Whether it be family films, faith-based entries, or those appealing to a very specific demographic, the grading is not very discerning. So for those that would show up to pay for this specific piece of propaganda, the biggest shock is not that it got an A but that it didn’t get an A+… a grade received by the aforementioned Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of Life of a Showgirl.
Now let’s get to the critical response. Needless to say, Amazon did not want reviews for this, but some brave souls went out to do their job, and the results were dismal. A second positive review (out of 20) did bring the Tomatometer score up to 10%, but it is already a candidate for potentially the worst-reviewed wide release of 2026. Sure, we still have 11 months to go, but here are the losers of that category over the past decade:
2025 – The Ritual (9%)
2024 – Summer Camp (8%)
2023 – Freelance (10%)
2022 – Firestarter (10%)
2001 – Separation (7%)
}2020 – Fantasy Island (9%)
2019 – Replicas (9%)
2018 – Death of a Nation (0%)
2017 – Flatliners (4%)
2016 – Max Steel / The Disappointments Room (0%)
The showing up is reportedly happening mostly in states that voted for the subject’s husband, again while other sources have reported that tickets are being bought for venues that end up being mostly empty (a la Sound of Freedom). But it is going to take a lot more ticket-buying for the film to be considered a success of any kind. You see, Amazon paid $40 million to make this, and then reportedly spent at least another $35 million to market the film. The only documentaries to ever gross as much as Melania needs to make to turn a profit for Amazon are Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour ($178.9 million) and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 ($119.1 million).
Melania can chase its opening weekend headline all it wants, but unless its very specific demographic continues to show up, whether paid to do so or not, this movie is going to be a bomb. And unless it manages to get over $20 million, it will miss out on beating Al Gore’s Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth ($24.1 million) or Won’t You Be My Neighbor? ($22.8 million), neither of which made it to 1,000 theaters (Melania opened in over 1700).
The self-financed and self-distributed adaptation of the video game Iron Lung opened in second place this week with $17.9 million. Reportedly costing less than $3 million to make, writer/director/YouTuber Mark Fischbach aka Markiplier nearly sextupled that in three days, pulling off a number that has eluded many distributors over the years. Studios like Bleecker Street, Briarcliff, and Broad Green have never had an opening that high in all their years of 2,000-plus venue releases. Markiplier Studios talked 3,000 theaters into playing Iron Lung, and the gambit paid off for both. Not that they bothered to reach out to a good number of critics, but those who did receive outreach have been politely impressed with the effort. Its 10 posted reviews are split right down the middle at 50% on the Tomatometer.
Disney’s Zootopia 2 now ranks 43rd on the domestic chart among first-run releases with $408.9 million. That is, after making $5.8 million this weekend (up 9% from last weekend) to finish fourth, marking its 10th straight week in the top five. It joins Barbie, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and Top Gun: Maverick, among others, including the last film to achieve this during the holiday season of 2023, Migration. The animated film has settled into ninth place among global releases, where it should remain as it passes $1.77 billion. That’s technically eighth among Hollywood releases when you consider Ne Zha 2’s $2.23 billion haul overseas. Yet the shot of being 2025’s top domestic release remains a slow crawl as A Minecraft Movie was at $423.5 million at the end of its 10th weekend of just $290,051. 2025’s leader was only in the top five for seven weeks and was out of the top 10 by weekend nine. Do not count Zootopia 2 out of reaching for one more highlight. Less than $15 million to go.
Here we are on weekend seven for James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash, where it made $5.5 million (a 14% increase from last weekend) for a total of $386.1 million. The Way of Water made $15.9 million in its seventh weekend and was over $620 million. Don’t worry fans, as it is still going to make $400 million domestic. It would be a heckuva moment if it didn’t. Bigger news is that it is now over $1.4 billion, passing Avengers: Age of Ultron for 18th all time on the worldwide scale. North America may be less interested in Pandora, but it is now the 14th film to gross over a billion dollars alone outside the continent, the third film of 2025 to do it after Ne Zha 2 and Zootopia 2.
Jason Statham has had some of his best openings the past two years with The Beekeeper ($16.5 million) and A Working Man ($15.5 million). Before then, apart from The Meg films and Hobbs & Shaw, the action star did not have a $10 million opening as the solo headliner since, well, The Mechanic in 2011. The Beekeeper, in fact, was the only solo-go to not have a giant shark that grossed over $40 million. Shelter, the second release from Black Bear Pictures, started better ($5.5 million) than last November’s Christy ($1.3 million) and added another $7.5 million internationally but is still one of Statham’s lowest starts. It ranks only ahead of In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale ($2.9 million) and Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre ($3.1 million) and behind one of his first breakout projects, The Bank Job ($5.9 million), and the 2021 pandemic release of Wrath of Man ($6.8 million). Black Bear is still getting their feet wet from production to distribution, but Shelter’s start would still be Bleecker Street’s second best opening, and they have been doing this since 2015.
Timur Bekmambetov’s Mercy fell from first to seventh this weekend with $4.7 million. The $60 million Amazon/MGM project has now grossed $19.4 million to date. This is slightly below par for late January films such as The Gentlemen, Jason Statham’s remake of The Mechanic, and last year’s Flight Risk. Each of those were between $20-21 million after 10 days and had second weekends between $5-6 million. The Mechanic and Flight Risk came up just shy of $30 million, while Guy Ritchie’s film stretched to $36 million. This is more likely in the former category. Not shaping up to be a great theatrical month for Amazon.
As of Tuesday, The Housemaid was approximately $1 million off the pace of where Patch Adams was back in 1998. After $3.5 million this weekend (just an 11% drop), it is now closer to $2 million off the pace with $120.6 million in the bank compared to Patch’s $122.3 million on its 45th day of release. $130 million domestic may end up being just a bit out of The Housemaid’s range, but the film is over $240 million globally and has become Lionsgate’s 17th-highest grossing worldwide film ever. If you take out the franchises – The Hunger Games, Twilight, John Wick, Now You See Me, The Expendables, and Divergent – it is actually their fifth highest behind La La Land, Knives Out, Wonder, and Fahrenheit 9/11. (They handled domestic distribution only on Monster Hunt 2, and we’re not giving Wonder franchise status with White Bird, are we?) Of course, The Housemaid is about to become another franchise for them soon enough.
After particularly damning claims against the Safdies hit the news (again) last week about their casting and judgment on the set of their 2017 film, Good Time, Josh’s Marty Supreme remains in the top 10 with $2.9 million. The film is now just shy of $91 million domestic and over $115 million worldwide, the third best global total for A24 behind only Civil War ($122.6 million) and their Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All At Once ($139.3 million).
Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple continues to fall, this time in 10th with $1.6 million. At this point, with $23.6 million, it is not going to make in its theatrical run what the third film did in its opening weekend. A real shame given it is the best-reviewed film of the franchise.
Only three films since the pandemic have been able to post a $100,000+ per-theater average in their limited openings. Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme ($145,833), Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City ($140,857), and Louis C.K.’s Fourth of July ($109,361). That’s a… choice… list. Well, now it can add a fourth with Aidan Zamiri’s semi-fictional The Moment, featuring Charli XCX navigating her Brat Summer tour. It grossed $428,000 this weekend in just four theaters for a $106,985 PTA. If those numbers hold, it is the seventh-best four-theater launch of the modern era behind The Grand Budapest Hotel, American Sniper, Moonrise Kingdom, Steve Jobs, The Imitation Game, and The Revenant. Every film on this list to open over $321,000 has gone on to gross at least $13 million. The A24 release will expand next week. If they opened it wide this weekend, it may have even outgrossed Melania. Meanwhile, Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet continues to do well in its Oscar stretch, making another $1.5 million this weekend to bring its total over $20 million domestic and over $57 million worldwide.
For completists, Renny Harlin’s The Strangers: Chapter 3 opens next week. The first two films did not post huge numbers but they were big enough for Lionsgate to find success with each. Angel Studios’ romantic comedy Solo Mio with Kevin James also opens. Will either have enough interest to knock Send Help from the top spot?
Erik Childress can be heard each week evaluating box office on Business First AM with Angela Miles and his Movie Madness Podcast. [box office figures via Box Office Mojo]
Thumbnail image by ©Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
