This is the latest edition of the Movies Fantasy League newsletter. The drafting window for this season has closed, but you can still sign up to get the newsletter, which provides a weekly recap of box-office performance, awards nominations, and critical chatter on all the buzziest movies.
We’re only two weeks into the MFL season, and I’m already sending this newsletter out hat in hand because the film industry has thrown me a curveball. Terrifier 3 just topped the box-office charts with a whopping $20 million haul as America stated its preference for Art the Clown over Art…hur Fleck the clown prince of crime. We’ll get into Joker: Folie à Deux falling precipitously down the box-office ranks momentarily. For now, let’s start with a mea culpa: Terrifier 3’s big, triumphant weekend won’t earn anyone MFL points because the film wasn’t available to be drafted. That one’s on me, folks.
The first two Terrifier movies operated completely beneath my radar, perhaps a function of my psyche’s innate defense mechanism to keep these defiantly over-the-top gorefests out of my life. I like horror movies, but as you know if you’ve browsed any streaming platform’s horror offerings, the ratio of “low-budget trash you don’t need to care about” to “low-budget trash that’s worth watching” can be very high; word of mouth matters a lot, and there weren’t a lot of mouths telling me I’d like the Terrifier movies. It was only a few weeks ago I finally had somebody tell me about these movies and their clown-faced protagonist. That’s when the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon kicked in, and I started noticing the franchise kind of everywhere, from social-media conversations to Google results. I still don’t intend to see these movies, but that’s fine. The film industry works better when there are movies that attract pockets of fandoms I’d never claim as my own and make money off of them. (Dinesh D’Souza excepted.) Good for Terrifier 3 and its merry band of sickos buying tickets to see it! I’m just sorry it wasn’t available to be drafted. I live, I learn, I forgive myself, I move on.
Box Office Updates
Aside from freaky-faced clowns doing arts and crafts with the internal organs of their victims, this weekend’s box office was kind of dud-coded. The two major wide-release debuts were the Pharrell Williams documentary-in-Legos Piece by Piece and director Ali Abassi’s The Apprentice, about the rise to power of someone called Donald Trump. Piece by Piece’s $3.85 million yield was good for fifth place, behind Terrifier 3, the third weekend of The Wild Robot, the sixth weekend of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and the turkey carcass that is Folie à Deux. Perhaps if more people knew there would be a Lego Wicked trailer, things might have turned out better. But fifth place is better than tenth, which is where The Apprentice ended up, earning just $1.6 million on over 1,700 screens. So, yes, that means the rosters that have The Apprentice as their only active film so far will enter the standings with one point.
Meanwhile, Saturday Night expanded into wide release but only pulled in $3.4 million on 2,300 screens, which is bad news for everything from Gen-X nostalgia to my hope that Gabriel LaBelle and Cooper Hoffman will get cast in a series of buddy comedies where they take turns being the stressed pragmatist and the idealistic genius.
As for Joker … ouch. A fourth-place showing, with only $7 million on the weekend and a $51 million two-week cumulative. A lot of you picked this movie, and I imagine you’re already regretting it, so I don’t mean to rub salt in the wound, but this is one of the bigger faceplants we’ve seen in a while. Remember how we were all dunking on The Marvels last year for hitting MCU rock bottom? That movie had $64 million after two weeks. And given how the awards-season craft nominations that go to blockbusters tend to go to financially successful blockbusters, I wouldn’t count on awards season to bail this movie out. On the bright side … I mean, you probably didn’t stub your toe today. So appreciate that.
(On the actual bright side: Joker crossed the $50 million threshold, good for 15 bonus points.) Here’s your leaderboard as it currently stands: