Weekend Box Office: ‘The Nun’ Conjures a Franchise-Best Debut

The Nun is not only the latest spinoff from The Conjuring franchise, it’s now scored the biggest opening in the franchise’s history. The horror film also became the second-biggest opening in history for any September release, whether it involved any kind of conjuring or not. Here’s the full weekend box office chart:

The original Conjuring from 2013 was the previous high-water mark for the series in terms of opening weekends, with $41.8 million. The Nun’s $53.5 million blows that out of the (holy) water, and its $131 million worldwide after just three days in theaters is an incredible feat for an R-rated spinoff from a movie about cantankerous ghosts. (Not to mention one that cost just $22 million.) It’s truly a shocking outcome for this series that started as a surprise hit a few years ago. Its C CinemaScore is not good, but the film is already a big hit no matter what it does from here.

The Nun is also the first film to knock Crazy Rich Asians out of the top spot on the box-office chart after three weeks in a row as the to fop in the country. Dropping an estimated 38 percent from last weekend, the film grossed $13.6 million, bringing its domestic total to an impressive $136.2 million. (It’s grossed an additional $28.5 million internationally.) It’s already the 13th biggest film of 2018, and it will pass Ready Player One and Ocean’s 8 and inch closer to the top ten in a matter of days. (It’ll probably take another week or two to pass the number 10 film, Hotel Transylvania 3.)

Third place on the box-office chart belonged to the other wide release of the weekend: Jennifer Garner’s Peppermint, a revenge thriller with Garner assuming the role of a vigilante who swears revenge against the people who killed her family. CinemaScore voters gave the film a B+ (a lot better than critics, whose reviews yielded at 14 percent Rotten Tomatoes score) and the film grossed $13.2 million. The Meg fell to fourth place on the chart while earning another $6 million. Its $131.5 million domestic total is a decent number; its $360.4 million internationally is insane for a movie about a giant killer shark trying to eat Jason Statham. Rounding out the top five was the innovative thriller Searching starring John Cho; after three weeks the film has grossed $14.3 million.

The Nun also had the weekend’s second-biggest average on a per-screen basis, with $13,803 across 3,876 screens. On just two screens, a much-smaller movie called Kusama: Infinity, a documentary about the famous artist, had a better average. It made $30,400 on two screens around the country, for an average of [does very complicated math things] of $15,200.

Gallery – The Highest Grossing Movies of All Time: