This post was originally published on this site.
About a week ago, it seemed pretty clear that Warner Bros./DC’s “Clayface” would be the No. 1 film on this coming pre-Halloween weekend. With “Other Mommy” getting poor reception and “Resident Evil” out of the top 5, it stands to be the seasonal horror film of choice and provide some greatly needed theatrical success for Warner Bros.
But A24’s “You Can See Everything” has turned those expectations on their head as it earned the biggest opening for a documentary in 22 years. After a $2.6 million Tuesday, the Nathan Fielder/Lance Oppenheim film has $20.8 million and will become the first documentary since 2018 to pass $30 million by the end of a second weekend, during which it will expand from 855 locations to approximately 2,600 nationwide.
Currently, “Clayface” is projected for a $25-30 million opening weekend, which would be a solid start for this $40 million-budgeted body horror film. But “You Can See Everything” is expected to blow past its $15.8 million opening with a second weekend of at least $18 million, and there’s no telling how far the watercooler buzz of the acclaimed Elizabeth Holmes chronicle will go.
Seriously, no telling. The closest comp to the rapid rise of “You Can See Everything” is “Borat,” Sacha Baron Cohen’s darkly comedic mockumentary, which in 2006 opened to $26.8 million from 837 screens. “You Can See Everything” marks the largest opening from a screen count of less than 1,000 since that film 20 years ago.
In its second weekend, “Borat” expanded to 2,566 screens and did even better with $28.2 million, going on to finish with a $128.5 million domestic total. “You Can See Everything” probably won’t get that far, but that precedent, combined with its strong midweek grosses, is why a higher second weekend is almost assured and why it could swipe the No. 1 spot from “Clayface” if it falters.
But if “Clayface” is able to secure the strong word of mouth that “Other Mommy” couldn’t, there’s no reason why the two films can’t coexist. While getting more buzz than any documentary in more than a decade, “You Can See Everything” is still a deliberately discomfiting three-hour film, and there will be plenty of audiences who would rather spend their weekend getting into the Halloween spirit with a good horror movie.
The majority of early reviews seem to agree that “Clayface” is just that, giving it a 74% Rotten Tomatoes score as of time of writing with 56 reviews logged.
“Clayface” will be the first Warner Bros. film released under Skydance ownership, and with a lower budget than recent misfires like “Practical Magic 2,” “The End of Oak Street” and certainly “Supergirl” and “Digger,” this film just needs to perform like a solid mid-budget horror title — the sort that New Line Cinema puts out on a regular basis — to give the studio a needed win.
But fairly or unfairly, “Clayface” also has to overcome any perceptions among comic book movie fans that this is DC’s equivalent of Sony-produced Marvel films like “Morbius” or “Kraven the Hunter” that tried to turn superhero villains into the main stars of their own darker tales without any connection to their heroic adversaries.
Of course, there have been successful examples of that with Sony/Marvel’s Spider-Man-free “Venom” and Warner Bros.’ own Batman-less “Joker,” which became the first $1 billion R-rated hit. But Clayface, while having his own popular stories among Batman fans, is certainly no Joker in terms of pop culture notoriety.
Written by acclaimed horror vet Mike Flanagan and directed by James Watkins, whose credits include the “Black Mirror” episode “Shut Up and Dance” and Blumhouse’s remake of “Speak No Evil” starring James McAvoy, “Clayface” certainly has the genre pedigree behind it. If it can build interest simply as a solid horror movie rather than as a DC villain origin story, it may be able to get some of the crossover interest that “Resident Evil” has enjoyed for the past month. If not, the Halloween release period may not be enough to keep it going.
But while “You Can See Everything” is flipping the box office script thanks to its widespread acclaim, there is another movie going wide this weekend that doesn’t look like it will get far despite its own rave reviews. That’s Fathom Entertainment’s “Wildwood,” the latest stop-motion animated film from Oregon-based studio Laika and founder/director Travis Knight.
After a six-year production process and a budget of at least $100 million, “Wildwood” is being hailed as not only the most ambitious film ever from Laika but for all of stop-motion. But despite critics hailing it as the best animated film of the year with a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, the film is expected to open to a limp $6-8 million.
Laika has never been a box office titan. Its last film, “Kubo and the Two Strings,” opened to just $12.6 million via Focus a decade ago and grossed just $76 million worldwide against a $60 million budget. Even the stop-motion studio’s highest-grossing film, the 2009 dark fantasy “Coraline,” has a lifetime global gross of $188 million after a 15th anniversary re-release in 2024.
And now “Wildwood,” a PG-13 fantasy that won’t attract families with kids younger than 12, is coming to theaters without the marketing muscle of a major studio and at a time when even the rave reviews for DreamWorks’ “Forgotten Island” couldn’t overcome mass audiences’ reluctance to buy a ticket for original animation, resulting in that film flopping with just $60.6 million grossed worldwide.
But unlike “Forgotten Island,” “Digger,” or any of the other major studio flops this year, “Wildwood” isn’t a film that is going to make a dent on the quarterly earnings of a publicly traded company. Laika is a studio funded by the largesse of Travis Knight’s billionaire father, Nike founder/CEO Phil Knight. Like a Renaissance patron of the arts, he has kept Laika open and making stop-motion animation for the love of the game even as it lacks the branding deals and much of the merchandising that Hollywood animation uses to make billions far beyond the box office.
For Fathom, which is attached to “Wildwood” through a distribution deal, this will simply be a modest fall offering that will try to reach $23.4 million domestic total of indie animation release “The Amazing Digital Circus” this summer, aiming for a similar audience of teenage and adult hardcore animation lovers.
A similar opening weekend in the mid-single digits is also expected for Black Bear’s “Wicker,” a Sundance acquisition starring Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgard as a social outcast and her unexpected boyfriend…who is made out of wicker and brought to life. The film got strong reviews out of Sundance last winter, receiving a 95% Rotten Tomatoes score.
Releasing on 1,471 screens, “Wicker” will look to bring in a primarily female audience with its fantastical take on the romcom genre, which has extended to the film’s marketing with a poster reminiscent of a stereotypical fantasy romance novel. The film caught some social media buzz last month when it was announced that 4DX would offer a one-night only special engagement on Oct. 28 for the film, using its moving seats to provide some more tongue-in-cheek fun for the film’s steamier scenes.
The post ‘Clayface’ vs. ‘You Can See Everything’: The Box Office Matchup No One Saw Coming appeared first on TheWrap.