Long Range Forecast: Warner Bros. Kicks Off Spooky Season with BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

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Long Range Forecast — September 6, 2024

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice | Warner Bros.
Domestic Opening Weekend Range: $60M – $80M

Warner Bros. ushers in the fall with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, reuniting several of the key actors from 1988’s Beetlejuice—including Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, and Catherine O’Hara—and adding to the mix it-girl Jenna Ortega, who previously worked with director Tim Burton on Netflix’s “Wednesday.”

Burton hasn’t directed a feature film since 2019’s Dumbo (domestic opening $35.9M, domestic total $114.7M), part of a run of Disney remakes unofficially kicked off by the billion-dollar success of Burton’s 2010 release Alice in Wonderland (domestic opening $116.1M; domestic total $334.1M), which made more money in its opening weekend than Dumbo would later make in its entire domestic run. With Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Burton revisits the world of one of his most popular and enduring films; it’s a hopeful return to form for the director, who hasn’t opened a film to higher than $50M since the aforementioned Alice.

The nostalgia factor of Burton reuniting with Keaton, Ryder, and O’Hara could boost interest among Millennials and older generations. At the same time, younger moviegoers will hopefully be drawn in by Ortega, playing Lydia Deetz’s (Ryder) daughter. The actress has already helped to successfully launch one franchise reboot with 2022’s Scream (domestic opening $30M, domestic total $81.6M) and 2023’s Scream VI (domestic opening $44.4M, domestic total $108.1M). Though both Scream and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice are reboots and both co-star Ortega, they don’t have much else in common; Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, with its undoubtedly higher budget, marquee-name director, and nearly 40-year gap since the first film, goes into its opening weekend with higher expectations than Paramount release Scream, a surprise hit when it came out in January 2022.

A more apt comparison may be Sony’s pandemic-era release Ghostbusters: Afterlife (domestic opening $44M, domestic total $129.3M); other recent reboots of pop culture mainstays of the ’80s and ’90s include this year’s Twisters ($81.2M domestic opening), 2018’s The Predator (domestic opening $24.6M, domestic total $51M), 2020’s Bad Boys for Life (total $62.5M, domestic total $206.3M), last year’s Haunted Mansion (domestic opening $24M, domestic total $67.6M), and—the biggest box office outlier—2022’s Top Gun: Maverick (domestic opening $126.7M, domestic total $718.7M). The biggest earner of the set, Bad Boys for Life and Top Gun: Maverick, came out in January and May, respectively, while for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Warner Bros. has opted for a release in early September.

In the past, a generally quiet frame at the box office, Warner Bros. has more or less claimed the first weekend in September for itself, starting with 2016’s Sully (domestic opening $35M, domestic total $125M) and continuing with a run of (mostly) horror films: It in 2017, The Nun in 2018, It Chapter 2 in 2019, Tenet in 2020, Malignant in 2021, and The Nun II in 2023. Opening weekends among that set range from $5.4M (for the day-and-date release of Malignant) to $123.4M (for It); our predicted opening weekend range of $60M-$80M puts Beetlejuice Beetlejuice just ahead of The Nun (domestic opening $53.8M). Though Burton’s certainly associated with the horror aesthetic, his films don’t typically go for scares in the way the Nun or It films do, so it remains to be seen whether Beetlejuice Beetlejuice can grasp the momentum of spooky season and drum up strong holds as the calendar gets closer to Halloween.

Tracking Updates [as of 8/9]

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