The Rock and Chris Evans’ holiday action adventure Red One is now hitting theaters, and it’s not off to the best start at the box office. Variety is reporting that Red One looks poised to deliver a $30 million weekend for the high budget film, as it kicked off its three day campaign with an opening day total of $10.9 million from 4,032 theaters across North America. It’s not the best opening day for a film that is reported to have a $250 million production budget, and that’s not factoring in marketing costs either, but to be fair, this isn’t an ordinary release either.
Red One will soon find itself in a very crowded theatrical market, as two potential blockbusters are arriving in the form of Wicked and Moana 2. Those films will take most of the attention and in close proximity to each other, and then there’s wildcards like Gladiator II in the mix that will also take away mind share and box office share.
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The good news is that Red One was never positioned as a purely box office attraction. Amazon won a competitive bid war for Red One back in 2021, and at the time it was positioned as a Prime Video exclusive release. At that point the streaming wars were in full gear, so everyone was positioning to have exclusive films and shows as draws for their platform.
Since then though Amazon and other streamers started adding theatrical releases to some of their exclusive films, and Red One is the most recent example of this. Amazon clearly thought the film would be a big draw on the streaming service over the holiday season, and despite the weaker box office return, they are probably till right about that. On a macro level, anything Amazon earns from box office returns is just bonus money in the pot, and if the film performs well on the service when it eventually hits, it will be a winning scenario. Granted, they would have loved for this to earn even more on its box office run, but it’s not a make or break element like it might be for other projects.
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As for the rest of the box office lineup, Venom: The Last Dance is in the number 2 spot as it looks to bring in around $6.1 million. So far The Last Dance has brought in over $120 million domestically and over $400 million worldwide. That brings it closer to the last sequel Let There Be Carnage, which ended up making around $500 million during its box office run.
In the number 3 spot is The Best Christmas Pageant Ever with $6 million. That will bring it past the $20 million mark after the weekend on a $10 million production budget. At number 4 is Heretic with $4.6 million, and that is likely to cross the $20 million threshold after the weekend as well. In the number 5 spot is The Wild Robot with $4.5 million, bringing its total domestically to around $137 million, which would make it the 12th highest grossing North American release of 2024.
What did you think of Red One? You can talk all things movies (and Christmas) with me on Threads and Twitter @mattaguilarcb and on Bluesky @knightofoa!