‘Jujutsu Kaisen 0’ Leads Busiest Specialty Box Office Weekend in Months
This weekend was the busiest in months for a specialty box office still trying to find its footing a year after movie theaters reopened, with the anime film “Jujutsu Kaisen 0” leading the pack with an estimated $17 million opening.
While the threat of another industry-crippling COVID-19 wave still looms, the end of this past winter’s Omicron surge has given new hope to indie and specialty distributors trying to get moviegoers back into arthouses. But like the wider blockbuster scene, the biggest specialty success was driven by younger moviegoers with “Jujutsu Kaisen 0,” which scored another victory for Sony’s import wing Crunchyroll.
In recent years, Sony has been able to consistently draw anime fans to theaters with releases of highly anticipated film adaptations of hit TV series like “Dragon Ball Super: Broly,” “My Hero Academia: World Heroes Mission” and, most recently, “Demon Slayer: Mugen Train,” which launched last year to $21 million and set a new opening weekend record for a non-English film at the American box office.
The subsidiary that handled these releases, Funimation, was merged this month with anime streaming site Crunchyroll, which will now be the label for all theatrical anime releases. Like other films released by the label, “Jujutsu Kaisen 0” heavily skewed young and male with a whopping 77% in the 18-35 demo with 60% male.
On the more conventional side of the specialty market, distributors like Focus Features are hoping that the drop in infection rates will finally entice older moviegoers to return to theaters. This weekend, Focus released the mob thriller “The Outfit” in 1,324 theaters, earning an opening weekend of $1.5 million with 59% of the film’s audience being over the age of 35.
The film stars Mark Rylance as Leonard, a soft-spoken tailor who makes a living in Chicago selling suits to the only people who can afford them: gangsters who also use his shop as a money drop. But when he is ensnared in a feud between two rival gangs over an incriminating FBI tape, Leonard reveals sides to himself that no one knew existed.
The thriller, which has a 91% Rotten Tomatoes score, is the directorial debut of Graham Moore, who won an Oscar as screenwriter of “The Imitation Game” in 2015. Focus is looking for this film to be the start of a rebound in turnout for older audiences ahead of its release of “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” the sequel to a film that grossed a Focus-record $193 million worldwide in 2019.
“Graham has sewn up a strong debut opening with these numbers across the country buoyed by its word of mouth with a 94% audience score and well-received 91% critics score,” said Focus distribution chief Lisa Bunnell in a statement. “This all points to a healthy, long life to the film and we’re thrilled it’s delivering adult moviegoers back into theaters.”
Also opening this weekend is Sony/Stage 6’s “Umma” with an estimated $915,000 from 805 theaters. The horror film starring Sandra Oh has a per-theater average of $1,136 — around the same as “The Outfit” — but has received poor critical and audience reviews with a Rotten Tomatoes split of 29% critics and 55% audience.
Back on the non-English side, the controversial Hindi-language drama “The Kashmir Files” opened to $1.45 million from 230 screens, earning a per-theater average of around $6,300. Based around the exodus of Hindus from the northern region of Kashmir during an Islamist insurgency in 1990, “The Kashmir Files” has received financial and verbal support from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, but has been sharply criticized by opponents of Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a tool to foster prejudice against Muslims. The film has no critics reviews logged on Rotten Tomatoes but has a strong audience score of 96%.
Finally, among holdovers, NEON’s “The Worst Person in the World” has performed solidly in the face of the Omicron wave, earning $2.7 million through seven weekends in theaters. Joachim Trier’s drama about a 30-year-old woman in Oslo navigating an uncertain love life stands as the top domestic grossing release in the Best International Film Oscar category, topping the $2 million grossed by Japanese frontrunner and Best Picture nominee “Drive My Car.”
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