Is Leonardo DiCaprio still a box office draw?
The A-list star’s big-screen bankability will be tested over the weekend as his latest film, “One Battle After Another,” lands in theaters. Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s action epic is tracking to open to $20 million to $25 million in its box office debut. That’s about even with DiCaprio’s last theatrical effort, 2023’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which co-starred Robert De Niro and opened to $23 million. However, Oscar buzz and positive word-of-mouth (“One Battle After Another” boasts a near-perfect 97% on Rotten Tomatoes) could propel initial ticket sales higher — or at least help the film stick around beyond its opening weekend. “One Battle After Another” is expected to collect another $20 million at the international box office.
Staying power will be important because “One Battle After Another” carries a price tag above $130 million and requires big bucks — roughly $300 million — to break even theatrically. For context, Anderson’s highest-grossing film is the Western “There Will Be Blood,” which earned $76.4 million globally in 2007. Anderson, a force artistically if not always commercially, is best known for “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia,” “There Will Be Blood” and “The Master.”
That being said, theater owners and industry watchers aren’t willing to bet against Warner Bros. at the moment. That’s because the studio is enjoying an epic box office run with seven consecutive films having opened above $40 million — a first in Hollywood. The back-to-back successes of “A Minecraft Movie,” “Sinners,” “Final Destination Bloodlines,” “F1: The Movie” (which the studio distributed for Apple), “Superman,” “Weapons” and “The Conjuring: Last Rites” reversed the studio’s downtrodden streak of money-losers like “Joker: Folie a Deux,” “Mickey 17” and “The Alto Knights.” The turnaround in fortunes at Warner Bros. will take some of the financial pressure off “One Battle After Another.”
Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland,” the R-rated film follows DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson, a washed-up revolutionary who’s living off the grid with his daughter, Willa (newcomer Chase Infiniti), until an enemy resurfaces and threatens to split up the family. Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall and Teyana Taylor co-star. In Variety’s review, chief film critic Owen Gleiberman called “One Battle After Another” a “mesmerizing vision of a police-state America” and praised Anderson for delivering “the kind of twists and turns that feed the audience, giving us the childlike sensation that we have no idea what’s coming next.”
This weekend’s other new releases are Lionsgate’s R-rated slasher “The Strangers: Chapter 2” and Universal’s kid-friendly “Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie.”
“The Strangers: Chapter 2” is targeting $6 million to $8 million from 2,650 theaters in its first weekend in theaters. For comparison, “The Strangers: Chapter 1” launched to $12 million in 2024 and eventually earned $35 million domestically and $48 million globally. Lionsgate intends to turn “The Strangers” into a standalone trilogy — separate from the 2008 thriller of the same name, starring Liv Tyler — with Chapter 3 to be released at a later date. “Chapter 2” cost roughly $8.5 million to produce. In the second installment, the masked maniacs who terrorized the protagonists of the first entry discover that one of their victims (Madelaine Petsch) is still alive, so they return to finish the job.
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“Gabby’s Dollhouse,” one of the few G-rated films these days, is aiming for $12 million to $15 million from 3,500 North American theaters. It cost $32 million to produce. Based on the hit Netflix series for pre-schoolers, the story follows Gabby as she roadtrips with her grandmother (Gloria Estefan) to save her dollhouse from an evil cat lady (Kristen Wiig). In Variety’s review, Gleiberman described the movie as “‘Toy Story’ meets ‘Trolls’ meets a confectionary version of ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and called it “perfect for a very pint-sized demo.”
From Variety US