Box Office: It Ends With Us Scores $50 Million Opening Weekend, Borderlands Flops

Posted by Reinaldo Massengill on Tuesday, September 10, 2024

Colleen Hoover’s literary sensation “It Ends With Us” is now a box office smash.

A film adaptation of her 2016 novel, starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni (who also directed), has collected a stellar $50 million from 3,611 North American venues in its opening weekend. “It Ends With Us” took in $30 million internationally for an $80 million global start. It’s a huge win for the movie, which Sony Pictures and Baldoni’s Wayfarer Studios co-financed for $25 million. “It Ends With Us” tells the story of Lily Bloom (Lively), a small business owner who gets caught in a love triangle between a charming but abusive neurosurgeon, Ryle (Baldoni), and her first boyfriend, Atlas (Brandon Sklenar). Critics were mixed but audiences have responded enthusiastically to the PG-13 romantic drama, which notched an “A-” on CinemaScore.

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“This is a sensational opening for a dramatic romance film,” says David A. Gross, who runs the movie consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research. “Pure romance is not a big performer at the box office, but occasionally the right story based on the right book comes along, and with a well-cast female lead the movie catches fire. That’s happening here.”

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TikTok and female audiences fueled the initial ticket sales for “It Ends With Us,” with Sony reporting that nearly half of opening weekend crowds were comprised of infrequent moviegoers. In other words, the film catered to a demographic that hasn’t been all that compelled to go to their local cinema in some time. Since Hoover wrote a best-selling sequel, “It Starts With Us,” it’s safe to assume that Lily, Ryle and Atlas will return to the big screen.

“It Ends With Us” just missed the No. 1 spot with “Deadpool & Wolverine,” starring Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds, adding $54.2 million from 4,330 screens in its third weekend of release. This is the first time in the month of August (a traditionally slow time for multiplexes) that two films have grossed $50 million in the same weekend. It’s also the first time in 34 years that a married couple had their films top the domestic box office — since Bruce Willis in “Die Hard 2” and Demi Moore in “Ghost” notched the No. 1 and No. 2 spot, respectively, in 1990.

“Clearly the momentum that July delivered as a gift to this month was a factor,” says senior Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian of the Marvel movie, which debuted at the end of last month. “But the real key to this weekend’s dynamic chart-topping duo was the perfect timing of ‘It Ends With Us’ coming on the heels of ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ that set up this unusual and most welcome August result.”

“Deadpool & Wolverine” has topped the box office for three consecutive weekends and generated a mammoth $494.3 million domestically and $1.029 billion globally to date. In the coming days, the Marvel superhero adventure will surpass 2019’s “Joker” ($1.07 billion) as the highest grossing R-rated movie in history.

This weekend’s other new release, Lionsgate’s video game adaptation “Borderlands” with Cate Blanchett, misfired with $8.8 million from 3,125 theaters to start. It landed in fourth place behind “Twisters,” which added $15.4 million from 3,664 locations in its fourth outing. Universal’s disaster epic has grossed $222 million domestically and $310 million worldwide.

“Borderlands” fared even worse at the overseas box office with $7.7 million, bringing its global total to an embarrassing $16.5 million. Although nearly 60% of production costs for “Borderlands” were covered by international presales, according to studio sources, it’s still a disastrous result for the film — and one that was far behind already low pre-release expectations. “Borderlands” carries a production budget of roughly $115 million as well as marketing and distribution costs of $30 million.

With a 10% “rotten” score on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes and “D+” CinemaScore, “Borderlands” is one of the worst-reviewed movies of the year. Eli Roth directed the movie, which follows Lilith (Blanchett), an infamous outlaw with a mysterious past, who reluctantly returns to her home planet of Pandora and forms an unexpected alliance to find the missing daughter of Atlas. The starry cast includes Jack Black, Edgar Ramírez, Ariana Greenblatt and Jamie Lee Curtis.

“It’s a total miss,” adds Gross. “If an action comedy is going to work, it has to be funny, and almost no one thinks this picture is.”

Elsewhere, Neon’s low-budget horror film “Cuckoo” brought in $3 million from 1,503 theaters in its first weekend on the big screen. Hunter Schafer (of “Euphoria” fame) stars in the movie as a teenager who moves to the German Alps to live with her father but becomes disturbed by strange occurrences. It cost $7 million to produce.

In limited release, A24’s drama “Sing Sing” added $226,965 while playing on 39 screens across major U.S. markets. The film — starring newly minted Oscar nominee Colman Domingo, and based on the real Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at Sing Sing maximum security prison — will continue to expand its screen count throughout August.

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