‘Quiet Place’ at Record Opening Day, ‘Horizon’ Starts Slow

Up against two new wide releases, Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” is looking to lead the domestic box office once again. The Disney release added another $17.1 million on Friday, down just 43% from its $30.5 million haul a week ago. Any three-day gross north of $53 million will have it rank among the ten biggest third weekends for a domestic release in box office history. It seems primed to land somewhere around seventh to tenth, with that range currently occupied by “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” ($59.9 million), “Spider-Man: No Way Home” ($56 million), “The Avengers” ($55.6 million) and “Jurassic World” ($54.5 million).

The North American total for “Inside Out 2” should get past $468 million through Sunday. The billion-dollar global milestone is coming up fast; it’ll be the first of the calendar year and the first since “Barbie.”

“A Quiet Place: Day One” will likely land in second, but it’s outperforming its tracking and will get closer to “Inside Out 2” than predicted. The Paramount release shushed up $22.5 million from 3,708 theaters across Friday and preview screenings, putting it above the single-day gross for director John Krasinski’s 2021 sequel ($19.3 million), making it the biggest opening day ever for the horror series. Projections for opening weekend total are now at $53 million, which would be above the 2018 original’s franchise high watermark of $50.2 million.

The production budget for “Day One” came in at $67 million. As with the first two “A Quiet Place” entries, this one also did very well with critics and is getting some solid buzz among early ticketbuyers (a B+ grade from audience surveyor Cinema Score — not shabby for a horror release, which typically score lower). This opening weekend is good business at the film’s price point and there’s the right response for the movie to stick around in the weeks ahead. Michael Sarnoski directs the Big Apple-set prequel, with Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff and Djimon Hounsou starring.

Meanwhile, the even quieter place is on the Western front. Kevin Costner‘s hopeful franchise-starter “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1″ isn’t performing up to its price point on opening weekend. The epic-length Western took in $4.1 million from 3,334 locations across Friday and preview screenings. That puts it on track to land within projections for a three-day opening in the low-teens — good for bronze on domestic charts.

That’s not small potatoes for an original adult drama these days. But the first chapter of “Horizon” was built to be a blockbuster, with a $100 million production cost — $38 million of which was put up by Costner himself, the film’s director, star and co-writer has bluntly shared. Then there’s a $30 million P&A spend on top of that, also backed by Costner and mysterious investors. Warner Bros. is distributing the film, but it’s not on the hook for production or marketing costs apart from some development costs incurred through New Line.

More than three decades ago, reports gave the coming release of Costner’s directorial debut “Dances With Wolves” the humorous moniker of “Kevin’s Gate,” coloring the Western as a brewing disaster on par with Michael Cimino’s notorious flop “Heaven’s Gate.” Like “Horizon,” Costner invested millions of his own money into “Wolves” too. But he proved the naysayers wrong then, scoring the sixth-highest-grossing release of 1991 and taking home the Oscars for best picture and best director.

But there have been clouds over the box office prospects for “Horizon” for a while now, not only because of its hefty price point. The film largely bellyflopped with critics after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. But now, more alarmingly, Costner’s target audience doesn’t seem to especially taken with the film either. “Horizon” landed with a B- grade on Cinema Score — an ominous sign that the Western isn’t fostering the buzz that it would need to leg out a successful run at the box office. Older audiences don’t usually rush for opening weekend and the coming Fourth of July holiday may end up buoying things a bit, but “Horizon” could’ve really used a bigger splash than this. And with Warner Bros. putting out “Chapter 2” in theaters just six weeks from now, the overall fortunes of the production stand to sink lower.

In fourth, Sony and Columbia’s “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” took in another $2.835 million on Friday. The Will Smith-Martin Lawrence action sequel is projected to add $10.2 million in is fourth weekend, which would mark another strong hold with a 46% drop. Total domestic gross will get to $165.1 million by the end of the weekend. The action sequel is now catching up fast to Disney’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” ($166 million) and should soon overtake it to become the fifth-highest grossing North American release of the year.

More to come…