Warner Bros.’ “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” now has the second highest ever opening weekend in the month of September, scoring an excellent $110 million domestic launch from 4,575 theaters.
After earning $13.5 million from Thursday previews and $28.3 million on Friday, Saturday saw a 45% increase to $41.8 million, ensuring that Tim Burton’s sequel becomes the second September release to earn a $100 million-plus opening. The first to do so was also a Warner Bros. title: Andy Muschietti’s “It” with $123.4 million in 2017.
In recent years, the box office has had to suffer through weeks of poor weekend returns between August and October due to a lack of highly anticipated tentpoles. That would have been the case here without “Beetlejuice 2,” as no other film this weekend grossed more than $10 million.
But Warner Bros. has allowed the fall box office to get off to a big start that should be sustained in the coming weeks by films like Paramount’s “Transformers One” and Universal/DreamWorks’ “The Wild Robot.”
How well “Beetlejuice 2” legs out against those films has yet to be seen. With a B+ on CinemaScore and a 4/5 score from PostTrak general audience polls, audience reception has been pretty solid and should lead to a strong second weekend given that next weekend’s big release is Universal/Blumhouse’s bleak horror film “Speak No Evil.”
After that, it will be down to whether audience buzz for “Beetlejuice 2” has extended far beyond fans of the original film. Opening day demographics, as expected, skewed heavily towards Millennials and Gen X audiences, with 76% over the age of 25 and 32% between the ages of 35-49.
More to come…
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