I said it! Did I not say it?! I did! I said Twisters would beat expectations! Very specifically I said it would make $80 million: “…the $50 million estimate for Twisters feels low, I won’t be surprised if that movie hits around $80 million.” Twisters blew away its opening weekend expectation of $50 million (domestic), opening with $80.5 million domestically, topping $123 million worldwide.
This is great news for Twisters, Universal, Glen Powell, Lee Isaac Chung, and Daisy Edgar-Jones, and it’s great news for the film industry, in general, as the summer rebound continues from its dismal start. The year in box office is still tracking behind last year’s post-pandemic best of $9 billion, but it might not be as wide a gap as originally estimated.
The bad news for Twisters is, of course, the arrival of Deadpool & Wolverine this weekend, with a secondary hit coming from the Olympics as well (box office typically trends down during the Olympics, as people stay home to watch the Games). With a budget around $150 million, the pressure is on Twisters to keep earning, but that will be more challenging with increased competition in the marketplace, especially as Deadpool will take most of the premium large format screens. IMAX alone accounts for $12 million of Twisters’ weekend. Spectacle movies like this need those PLF screens to juice their numbers, and losing the bulk of those screens will hurt Twisters, just as losing those screens to Oppenheimer last year hurt Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1.
This is what I mean when I say despite good opening weekends, the film industry isn’t healthy. We’re just back to the place we were in during the 2010s, depending on mega-budget spectacle films to prop up everyone else, but there isn’t really room for more than one of those films in the market at once. I HOPE I’m wrong and Twisters and Deadpool can coexist, and both play strong, as Barbie and Oppenheimer did last year, but more and more the Barbenheimer summer looks like a fluke, not a new normal.
Also, Deadline framing Twisters as some kind of red state win when Horizon just flopped after pursuing the same damn audience is some kind of thing. Yes, Twisters played well in the middle of the country (tornado-prone Oklahoma City was one of its biggest markets, but the movie was also shot there, and local crowds typically turn out for local productions), but you know what movie also played well in the middle of the country? Barbie. It’s like people trying to paint Yellowstone as a red state show—the ratings are too high for that, everyone is watching it. It just drives me nuts because I believe film can be a unifying force in culture, and rather than highlight “hey, everyone liked this thing!”, they choose to paint it as a partisan win for Trump country. Can’t wait to see how they characterize Deadpool’s inevitable gargantuan opening next weekend.
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