The House With A Clock In Its Walls Tick Tocks On The Clock, The Party Don't Stop With Its Great Opening Weekend As Three Other New Releases Bomb

The third weekend of September was led by a newcomer that got off to a strong start while the other three new wide releases did business ranging from underwhelming to outright dismal. Starting things off on a positive note was The House With A Clock In Its Walls, which kicked off its domestic box office run with $26.8 million, ahead of pre-release expectations and ahead of the opening weekends of comparable titles like the $23.8 million bow of Goosebumps and the $24.1 million debut of Maze Runner: The Death Cure. It was also only 8% behind the debut of Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children despite Clock In Its Walls not having the Tim Burton brand name and cost less than half of that September 2016 feature. This $42 million budgeted project also had an opening comparable to the $28.4 million debut of Jack Black's Nacho Libre 12 years ago and had the biggest opening weekend ever for an Eli Roth directorial effort. All in all, this was a really good bow for The House With A Clock In Its Walls that puts it on track for a final domestic haul just under or over $80 million domestically.



In second place we find A Simple Favor, which held quite well this frame as it went down only 35% to deliver another $10.4 million for a $32.5 million domestic gross to date. Looks like this one's getting past $50 million domestically, a great achievement considering it cost only $20 million to make. After a massive second-weekend drop last frame, The Nun fell only 43% this weekend, giving it another $10.2 million for a domestic gross of $100.8 million, making it only the 20th 2018 release to cross $100 million domestically. Meanwhile, The Predator fell a whopping 64% this weekend, which is actually a noticeable improvement over the 71% plunge of Predators from eight years ago. Grossing another $8.7 million this weekend, The Predator has now captured $40.4 million and is looking at a final domestic total in the underwhelming $52-54 million range.

In its sixth weekend of release, Crazy Rich Asians fell a tiny 25% and grossed another $6.5 million for a $159.4 million domestic haul. White Boy Rick fell 43% this frame for a second-weekend gross of $5 million, giving it a ten-day domestic gross of only $17.4 million. Peppermint continued her rampage as her movie fell just 38% this weekend, grossing another $3.7 million in the process and bringing its domestic cume up to $30.3 million.

Though opening in just over 1,700 locations, Michael Moore's new documentary Fahrenheit 11/9 was a box office bust, opening to only $3.1 million this frame, only 8% ahead of the opening weekend of Expelled: No Intellegence Allowed from ten years ago. Fahrenheit 11/9 likely bombed for the same reason that last month's Dinesh D'Souza Trump-fixated documentary Death Of A Nation also came up short at the box office, the Trump presidency is omnipresent in the media right now and shelling out money to see a documentary all about this dumpster fire of a President feels ridiculous when you can get all of that for free on the internet. Fahrenheit 11/9 is unlikely to crack $8 million domestically, making this the second directorial effort in a row for Michael Moore (following Where To Invade Next) to underperform at the domestic box office.

The Meg eased 39% this weekend, giving it another $2.3 million to chomp on as it swam to $140.5 million. Meanwhile, Searching rounded out the top ten with $2.1 million (a 31% drop from last weekend), bringing it up to a $23.1 million domestic total.

Just outside the top ten we find Life Itself, which grossed a disastrous $2.1 million this weekend, the second-worst opening weekend ever for a movie bowing in 2,500+ theaters, only behind the $2 million debut of fellow September release Friend Request. Life Itself came armed with a marketing campaign that shrouded its plot in mystery but never gave people taking in the marketing a reason to care about figuring out what it was actually about. If Life Itself manages to crack $5 million domestically, I'll be shocked.

Unbroken: Path to Redemption fell 40% in its second weekend of release, grossing another $1.3 million for a domestic gross of just $4.5 million. Mission: Impossible - Fallout fell 49% in its ninth weekend of release, grossing another $1.1 million for a $218.1 million domestic total while the arrival of a new family movie meant Christopher Robin fell 51% this weekend, grossing another $1 million and bringing its domestic haul up to $96.8 million.

And now we come to the final new wide release of the weekend, Assassination Nation, which scored the worst opening weekend for a 2018 wide release that wasn't named Beautifully Broken. Grossing just $1.02 million at 1,404 locations for an atrocious per-theater average of $733. NEON and AGBO were really giving this film a major release push in terms of theater count, but their marketing kept making it look like a knock-off of The Purge and there weren't really any clever viral marketing tactics used to drum up publicity. That might help explain just why this movie did so dismally in its opening weekend.

The Wife had its first-ever weekend-to-weekend decline this frame, but it went down only 13%, good enough to gross another $975,788 from 468 locations for a per-theater average of $2,085, a slightly better per-theater average than the one it had last weekend. The Wife has now grossed $4.9 million domestically. Colette was the biggest of this weekends limited release newcomers as it took in $156,788 from 4 locations for a per-theater average of $39,197, the ninth-best limited release opening weekend per-theater average of 2018. Also faring well in its first limited release frame was The Sister Brothers, which scored $122,028 from 4 locations for a per-theater average of $30,507.  No word yet on how fellow limited release newcomers Tea With The Dames did this weekend nor how Lizzie and The Children Act performed in their theater count expansions.

The top 12 movies this weekend grossed a total of $82.5 million, an average sum for this time of the year which can be chalked up to the lackluster state of the wide release newcomers, though the over-performance of The House With A Clock In Its Walls and solid holdovers like A Simple Favor. September 2018 has so far grossed at least $514 million and stands a good chance at surpassing the $626.4 million gross of September 2015 to become the second-biggest September ever.