Long Range Forecast — November 8, 2024
A counterprogramming duo hits theaters on the weekend of November 8 – 10, one a family-friendly Christmas movie from some of the biggest names in faith-based filmmaking, the other an A24 horror movie with religious elements. With little else getting a wide release between November 8 and the November 22 one-two punch of Gladiator 2 and Moana 2, decent word of mouth could draw audiences to The Best Christmas Pageant Ever or Heretic during chase weeks—at the very least, the two should face little competition over opening weekend, when they will be up against the third weekend of Venom: The Last Dance and the second weekend of Robert Zemeckis’s Here.
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever | Lionsgate
Domestic Opening Weekend Range: $7M – $12M
It’s been a tough year for Lionsgate at the box office, with only one of their 2024 releases thus far (May’s The Strangers: Chapter 1) opening above $10M and a pair of long-delayed films—video game adaptation Borderlands and Wonder spin-off White Bird—failing to generate box office buzz; the former only spent one week in the top five, and the latter opened last weekend at spot number 7.
To end 2024 on a good note, Lionsgate has a solid contender in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, produced by Jon and Andrew Erwin. The duo, collectively known as the Erwin Brothers, are superstars in the faith-based space whose collaboration with Lionsgate has yielded such films as 2018’s I Can Only Imagine ($17.1M domestic opening, $83.4M domestic total; released theatrically in collaboration with Roadside Attractions), 2021’s American Underdog: The Kurt Warner Story ($5.8M domestic opening, $26.5M domestic total), and 2023’s The Jesus Revolution ($15.8M domestic opening, $52.1M domestic total). Though all of the Erwin Brothers-Lionsgate films don’t hit to that degree (see the aforementioned White Bird, which opened to $1.5M), they don’t really need to, being modestly budgeted and boosted by grassroots marketing and audience goodwill accumulated by the Erwins. A film like February 2024’s Lionsgate release Ordinary Angels, also produced by the Erwin Brothers, can open to $6.1M, enjoy modest holds (-39% and -47% drops leading into weeks two and three), and land at a completely respectable $19.1M domestic total.
Ordinary Angels’ $6.1M domestic opening cume is in the range of what our forecasting panel expects for The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, a family-friendly comedy/drama based on a 1972 children’s book about six misfit children who sign up for the local Christmas nativity play. On board as director is Dallas Jenkins, who has certainly built up his own credibility in the faith-based space through his work as one of the key figures behind mega-hit The Chosen, which started as a webseries and has since found considerable theatrical success as a series of event cinema releases. The potential fly in the ointment for The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is the following weekend’s release of Red One, a Christmas action comedy starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans and released by Amazon/MGM. Of the two, Red One has far more star power and marketing muscle, and it casts a wider net in terms of audience. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever’s appeal to a smaller, more dedicated audience could prove to be its saving grace.
Heretic | A24
Domestic Opening Weekend Range: $7M – $12M
For audiences who are perhaps not feeling the Christmas spirit, there is Heretic, in which two young missionaries are trapped in the house of a mysterious stranger (Hugh Grant) who attempts to test their religious faith through a series of cat-and-mouse games. It’s written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, two of the writers behind A Quiet Place and the writers/directors of the Adam Driver sci-fi actioner (with dinosaurs) 65.
Horror movies tend to drop off at the box office after Halloween—thus films like this year’s Smile 2 and Terrifier 3 coming out in mid-October—and of A24’s five highest-grossing horror titles, four of them—Hereditary, ($13.5M domestic opening), Talk To Me ($10.4M domestic opening), Midsommar ($6.5M domestic opening), and It Comes at Night ($5.9M)—opened during the summer months. (The other, The Witch, came out in February.) Among A24 releases, Heretic‘s best comp might be 2019’s The Lighthouse ($10.8M domestic total); both have few characters and locations and hit wide release in the first weekend of November. By that time, however, The Lighthouse had already been in theaters for two weekends (opening on 8 screens in October and expanding to 586 the weekend after), making comparisons between the two difficult.
Further, based on its marketing Heretic looks decidedly more accessible to mainstream audiences than The Lighthouse, a black-and-white drama about a pair of lighthouse keepers losing their sanity. For that matter, the presence of Hugh Grant could give Heretic more mainstream appeal than either of October’s wide horror releases, neither of which features an actor with A-list name recognition. (And one of which, Terrifier 3, is from a series that prides itself on being so gory that it’s reportedly made some audience members vomit.) A positive critical reception and solid word-of-mouth could give Heretic a box office trajectory in the mold of Searchlight Pictures’ The Menu, which was released to 3,000+ screens in November 2022; that film opened to $9M and fought through a wave of holiday releases to end its theatrical run in late January with $38.5M.
Tracking Updates [as of 10/8]
| Release Date | Title | Opening Weekend Range | Distributor |
| 10/11/24 | Terrifier 3 | $12 – $18M | Cineverse |
| 10/11/24 | Saturday Night (WIDE) | $8 – $12M | Sony |
| 10/18/24 | Smile 2 | $20 – $35M | Paramount Pictures |
| 10/25/24 | Venom: The Last Dance | $70 – $100M | Sony/Columbia |
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