“28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” may have scored well with critics, but slightly more moviegoing audiences chose to spend the holiday weekend catching up with “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” James Cameron’s epic topped the North American box office charts for the fifth straight weekend with $13.3 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday. The Walt Disney Co. also celebrated another win as their Thanksgiving release “Zootopia 2” became the highest grossing animated Motion Picture Association release of all time.
Meanwhile “The Bone Temple,” directed by Nia DaCosta, landed in second place with $13 million through Sunday. By the end of Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, it’s expected to be at $15 million, still trailing “Avatar’s” projected $17.2 million. The film, released by Sony Pictures and starring Ralph Fiennes and Jack O’Connell, opened wide this weekend in 3,506 theaters on a wave of hype and strong reviews. It currently has a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, and 72% of audiences said in a PostTrak poll that they would “definitely recommend” the movie. Considering it’s also solidly in the horror genre and arriving in January, often a dumping ground for lesser movies, “The Bone Temple” should have done better. Internationally, it made $16.2 million from 61 markets.
But perhaps in a case of too much too soon, the sequel also comes less than a year after the previous installment, “28 Years Later,” which opened to $30 million in June. Going into the weekend, “The Bone Temple” was expected to make at least $20 million through Monday. With a reported $63 million production budget, not including marketing and promotion, it also has a long journey to break even.
“It’s one of those head-scratchers,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the head of marketplace trends for Comscore. “There may be a little bit of confusion from audiences. But word-of-mouth might sustain it in this marketplace, like we saw with ‘The Housemaid’ and ‘Zootopia 2.’”