M3GAN and Avatar: The Way Of Water give a much-needed boost to the January box office
The Way Of Water and M3GAN outperform in an otherwise dreary theatrical season
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As we’ve officially entered the theatrical season lovingly known as “Fuck you, it’s January,” a traditional dumping ground for studios to discard films seen as unsuitable to kick it with the heavy hitters to come later in the year. The first of these for 2023 came in the form of Universal’s M3GAN, about a killer AI doll who becomes overly attached to the child she’s programmed to protect.
A film like M3GAN would normally capture the attention of fans interested in the constantly expanding mass-murdering-doll corner of the genre or your unemployed friend looking to pass time on a Tuesday afternoon. However, M3GAN has been coded to serve. Along with the innocuous star power of Girls alum Allison Williams and a wicked meme-ified marketing campaign, M3GAN slayed the box office, bringing in $30.2 million its opening weekend.
For an original, not-yet-franchised film, M3GAN surpassed expectations, and per Variety, had a January theatrical debut not seen for a horror film since 2012's Devil Inside.
However, The Way Of Water refuses to be outdone, earning $45 million in domestic box office sales over the weekend. It inches closer and closer to the $2 billion mark, with $1.7 billion earned worldwide. With over $500 million in domestic sales, The Way Of Water joins the ranks of Top Gun: Maverick and Spider-Man: No Way Home, the only two other films to pass this threshold since the beginning of the pandemic.
The result of these two’s success is a 70 percent increase in sales compared to the same weekend in January 2022. M3GAN and The Way Of Water’s solid performance which helps alleviate the aches and pains of this year’s holiday season, which unfortunately resulted in more flops than triumphs. Coming in third and fourth place out of the weekend are Dreamworks’ Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, and the Tom Hanks vehicle A Man Called Otto. Don’t worry, there’s more to come from January, with Teen Wolf: The Movie, Shotgun Wedding, Skinamarink, and more on the way.
Here’s the full top 10, courtesy of Box Office Mojo:
1. Avatar: The Way Of Water
2. M3GAN
3. Puss In Boots: The Last Wish
4. A Man Called Otto
5. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
6. Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody
7. The Whale
8. Babylon
9. Violent Night
10. The Menu
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While Avatar naturally continues as the main story, and there is a lot that could be said about M3GAN’s insane profit margin, I’m personally really glad to see Puss in Boots hanging there on the lists. While it’s not breaking records, it did pass double its budget this weekend and is showing some small staying power.Which as I really liked the film, although was astonished how dark it was, makes me glad as it is fun to see films like that perform well.
I’m just happy that Antonio Banderas gets a Puss in Boots movie that’s both critically and commercially successful, and I actually hope Universal wrangles an Oscar nomination for it.
I normally don’t like or see horror movies, but I saw M3GAN due to a combination of factors: One, the reviews were really good. Two, I have a $99 annual pass to the nearby theater (LOOK Cinemas, a weird chain with big giant reclining seats and in-theater food service) that entitles me to one free ticket per day throughout 2023. So I decided to go see it on Friday night, in a pretty full house.Everyone was laughing uproariously. Every time there was an ominous shot of M3gan or she killed someone, everyone laughed. Was that intentional? It wasn’t shot, edited, scored, or foleyed like a comedy. But I think the filmmakers knew it would get laughs, and intended the film to say “killer doll movies are stupid, and everyone should stop making them.” There is no point in seeing this movie unless either 1) you see it in a big crowd in a theater, or 2) you are a horror completist.
On Saturday I went to the theater again and saw Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which was excellent. Again, I wasn’t planning to bother until I saw it was getting really good reviews. And man, it’s really good. You don’t expect a Dreamworks movie (especially not one in the Shrek universe) to contain sober meditations on mortality, but that’s what this is (amidst all the jokes and hijinks). I will point out the not-even-remotely-new fact that some excellent actors are not cut out for voice work. Lookin’ at you, Florence Pugh. (Some others you might not expect were quite good, Olivia Colman and Ray Winstone particularly.)After I got home I watched Bullet Train on Netflix, which I had wanted to see in the theater but didn’t get around to it. It’s a lot of fun, especially if you’re a fan of tricky, Rube Goldberg-esque films. There’s a lot of Tarantino DNA in there, but it’s cheeky fun. (And extremely violent and bloody.)
I didn’t have any notes on Pugh’s performance and in fact didn’t even recognize her voice. But I thought Mulaney stuck out like a sore thumb. His voice work on Big Mouth is fine, I think he just wasn’t the right voice for his character. I kinda get what they were going for, but it definitely didn’t work for me. The movie was good otherwise.
The makers of M3GAN certainly don’t believe no one should make any more killer doll movies, since they’re going to make a sequel.
The studio, sure. The creatives? Dunno. But whether they intended it or not, it’s hard to see how anyone could take a killer doll movie even remotely seriously after this. (Or maybe nobody was taking them seriously before this…)
Producer James Wan also has a story-by credit on this film. I don’t know if Gerard Johnstone will be the one who directs the sequel, since Blumhouse sometimes changes that up, but Wan himself got to direct the first two Insidious & Conjuring movies before handing off each franchise to others. James DeMonaco directed the sequel to his (lousy) Purge movie. Within the recent killer-doll genre, William Brent Bell directed the sequel to his own The Boy (although the only film I’ve seen from him is Orphan: First Kill).
i go back and forth on whether avatar 2 is gonna beat top gun domestically or not. it’s got about 200 million to go and almost 6 weeks till ant man. seems likely!
White bitches already scare me when they aren’t killer dolls. NOOOO thanks!
Who was it on here that said they had the Hollywood inside track and Avatar was going to bomb horribly?
The AV Club cost themselves clicks and money because they have so many dumbass marvel fanboys out of the greys who bombed every story about Avatar 2 with their dumbass whining. Made me and lots of other people go to other sites for discussions about the biggest and best movie of the year.
My brain hurts reading the movie title, Teen Wolf: The Movie. I didn’t realize there was a Teen Wolf tv series up until now (based on the 1985 movie), which means that a more accurate title would fall down the same High School Musical colon well – Teen Wolf: The Movie: The TV Series: The Movie
Wait… someone’s complaining because people in the comments said that Avatar 2 was going to bomb? They’re saying that they went to other sites because of that?
But they’re still commenting and trolling here, so what happened that they didn’t stay on those other sites?
The opening “sentence” of this article left us all hanging. As we’ve entered “F You It’s January”…WHAT? What happens? Tell us!