David Harbour plays a killer Santa in VIOLENT NIGHT

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‘Wakanda Forever’ Overperforms During Sleepy December Weekend; ‘Violent Night’ Too With $13M+ – Sunday Box Office Update

By Anthony D'Alessandro

December 4, 2022 7:55am

'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,' 'Violent Night'
Marvel / Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/Universal Pictures
SUNDAY AM UPDATE: On one of the dullest weekends of the year, it’s good to see some movies overperforming. And we have the fourth weekend of Disney/Marvel Studios’ Black Panther: Wakanda Forever coming in at $17.59M, and Universal/87 North’s horror action comedy Violent Night over-indexing with $13.3M, slightly above its $10M-$12M projection.

As previously mentioned, that opening is just under Universal’s 2015 horror comedy, Krampus, which played the same early December frame, opening to $16.2M and legging out to $42.7M stateside. That pic was PG-13 to Violent Night‘s R. The movie minted a $20.3M global launch from 73 offshore territories. At the end of the day, Violent Night did what it was suppose to do. I hear Universal execs when they were considering a greenlight took the script home for the weekend and came back that Monday morning and said ‘Hell, yeah!’ to Violent Night.

“Violent Night had a terrific debut this weekend. 87North, director Tommy Wirkola, and the incomparable David Harbour as Santa crafted an incredibly original, fun, irreverent take on the ultimate superhero that thrilled audiences this weekend and will for many weeks to come,” exclaimed Universal Domestic Distribution Chief Jim Orr this morning.

With an estimated $56.4M for all movies, it’s the 8th-lowest weekend of the year, the bottom belonging to Jan. 28-30, with $34.9M. That’s when Morbius was suppose to go and Sony pushed it to April because of Omicron. Even in pre-pandemic times, this was never a glowing weekend, as people are distracted with holiday activities, though there’s always been a place for a genre movie to at least play to the 18-34 crowd, which Violent Night did to a near 60%. Still, richer days pre-pandemic: The first weekend of December earned $90.3M for all titles back in 2019.

RelishMix points out that the social media universe for Violent Night at 110M was juiced by 34.4M YouTube views and Universal’s 46.4M social media fan followings, as well as notably the pic’s star David Harbour, who counts around 11M followers after fours seasons of Stranger Things. On PostTrak, close to 40% said they bought tickets because it’s a horror action movie, while 32% said they came for Harbour.

Says RelishMix about the social media buzz for the film, “David Harbour is the hot-trending theme in much of the chatter on Violent Night, and bringing his Stranger Things audience to the comments. Fans are comping the movie to Nobody, Bullet Train, Bad Santa, of course, with Billy Bob Thornton, plus Die Hard — and more recent horror, Smile and Halloween Ends. The tone runs predominantly positive-to-mixed, as fans are happy to have a dark, non-cheesy film to drop into, ‘during the nightmare of the season of merriment.'”