Box office preview: ‘Haunted Mansion’ and ‘Talk to Me’ hope to make an impact against Week 2 of ‘Barbenheimer’

This past weekend’s hugely popular “Barbenheimer” double feature ended up being a huge boon for the box office, but can any new movies make any sort of dent against two unstoppable blockbusters? Read on for Gold Derby’s box office preview.

The first attempt has Disney releasing its third “Haunted Mansion” movie into over 3,700 theaters on Friday, almost 20 years after the Eddie Murphy movie based on the popular Disneyland and Magic Kingdom attraction. This one is directed by Justin Simien (“Dear White People,” “Bad Hair”) and stars Oscar nominee Lakeith Stanfield (“Judas and the Black Messiah”), Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson, Tiffany Haddish and Danny De Vito, as well as Oscar winners Jamie Lee Curtis and Jared Leto as very specific ghosts. Stanfield plays Ben Matthias, an astrophysicist working as a ghost tour guide in New Orleans, called upon by a single mother (Dawson) who has moved into a mansion that is … you guessed it … haunted! Wilson, Haddish and De Vito play three of the individuals who help Ben with the 999 ghosts that inhabit the Haunted Mansion.

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This is a horror-comedy, but one that’s been Disney-fied to make it suitable for younger and family audiences. Like 2003’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” which kicked off a multi-billion global franchise and took actors Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom to new heights of fame, “Haunted Mansion” is PG-13, rather than the standard family-friendly PG, but it’s a soft PG-13.

Oddly, that Murphy “Haunted Mansion” opened just four months after the first “Pirates,” and it did not do well, making just $75 million domestically and a little more overseas; this may have been why it’s been 20 years between attempts. (Granted, there was a popular “Muppets Haunted Mansion” on Disney+ just a few years ago.) General reactions have been positive so far, although reviews have been slightly more mixed, possibly due to critics’ general dislike of horror-comedies.

The question is whether the IP that is a popular Disney theme park attraction can make any sort of mark against the equally popular Mattel IP that is “Barbie.” In any other summer, I might have suggested there may be room for both, but there really isn’t, and because of that, “Haunted Mansion” will probably have to settle for a strong third place opening with somewhere in the low-to-mid $30 millions, falling just behind “Oppenheimer,” which is holding on to all the IMAX screens for two more weeks.

Either way, “Barbie” will be #1 again this weekend with somewhere around $60 to 65 million, followed in second place by Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” with between $35 and 37 million. Even though both have been received well, they will have large drops only because both did so much of their first weekend business on Thursday. That puts “Haunted Mansion” in third, followed by the equally unstoppable “Sound of Freedom,” which has now sailed past $120 million and all expectations.

Opening in roughly 2,300+ theaters is A24’s latest horror movie “Talk to Me,” from Australian filmmakers (and viral sensations) brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, making their feature directorial debuts after a number of shorts, many for their RackaRacka YouTube channel. Most of those shorts were more comedic, but “Talk to Me” is a deathly serious film about a group of teenagers who start playing with the supernatural through a party activity, using a petrified hand to talk to those who have passed. It stars destined-for-stardom newcomer Sophie Wilde as Mia, an Australian teen who lost her mother and desperately wants to find out how she died, using the hand.

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The movie slayed at Sundance back in January and has played a few other festivals (such as Fantasia in Montreal). Although it may seem counter-intuitive to release a horror movie against Disney’s “Haunted Mansion,” they’re likely to attract very different audiences, with “Talk to Me” shooting for older teens and younger 20-somethings. Reviews will certainly help matters, as it is one of the best-reviewed movies of the year, with 96% on Rotten Tomatoes.

A24 has a solid reputation for horror films like “Hereditary” and “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” although many of them platformed in a few cities before going nationwide, such as Ari Aster’s “Beau is Afraid” earlier this year. Oddly, the last three A24 horror/genre films that opened nationwide right off the bat were Aster’s Midsommar in July 2019,  David Lowery’s “The Green Knight” in July 2021, and last year’s “Men” from Alex Garland. The last of those opened the best with $7.6 million in just 2,212 theaters, but Garland also was fairly well-established, as was his recently Oscar-nominated star Jessie Buckley.

“Talk to Me” has a ton of buzz, but it’s also a lesser-known property in terms of the filmmakers and their cast, so it will rely on the solid marketing so far. With the right theater count, it could still bring in between $5 and 7 million, which may not be enough to get into the top five.

Furthermore, GKIDS is releasing Takehiko Inoue’s sports anime “The First Slam Dunk,” a huge hit in his native Japan, into theaters across the U.S. and Canada on Friday. It’s hard to determine whether anime fans, who have rushed out to many previous theatrical releases, will do the same here, especially considering the longevity of Inoue’s series, dating back to manga form in 1990 and four previous features in the mid-’90s. Without a theater count, it’s hard to determine how this might do but presumably under $3 million.

If you’re in New York City, you can catch Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s “The Beasts,” which nine of Spain’s Goya Awards earlier this year. It involves a French couple trying to set up a growing business in rural Spanish countryside, running afoul of a pair of local farmers. It opens at the city’s long-running arthouse staple, the Film Forum.

Lastly, Lily Gladstone – who Gold Derby experts have as presumptive frontrunner in the Supporting Actress category for Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” – stars in Morrisa Maltz’s directorial debut, “The Unknown Country,” which Music Box Films will release in New York and L.A. this Friday.

Check back on Sunday for the box office on the above films.

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