Box Office Week: The New Mutants FINALLY opens and the results are underwhelming, with $7M on 2,400 screens and $2.9M international. Tenet however does better in its international opening, claiming a pretty good $53M debut.

RankTitleDomestic Gross (Weekend)Worldwide Gross (Cume)Week #Percentage ChangeBudget1The New Mutants$7,000,000$9,900,0001N/A$100M2Unhinged$2,600,000$16,534,9033-35%$33M3Bill & Ted Face the Music$1,060,000$1,060,0001N/A$25M4The Personal History of David Copperfield$520,000$10,321,2651N/A$15M5Words on Bathroom Walls$453,360$1,083,6052+5%$9MNotable Box Office StoriesThe New Mutants - After what feels like an immensely long time on the shelf (certainly helps that 2020 has felt a full decade long) The New Mutants finally arrives in theaters to a global pandemic and growing civil unrest in the US. Who would have it any other way? It opened pretty poorly even considering all that, only scrapping up to be $7M at #1 in 2,400 screens. Now that could be dismissed if this was the first new release in 5 months, but Unhinged scored just $3M shy of that last week and Grumpy Gus Crowe: The Movie should really be nowhere near in competition to a major franchise film like Mutants. Now to be fair to those poor mutants who are new, this is by no means the longest a film has stayed on the shelf, heck even the longest for a $100M big budget. Just look at Chaos Walking, a Doug Liman directed, Charlie Kaufman written, Tom Holland starring, $100M film that was shot all the way back in 2017 and is still not out. But it is notable that the trailer to New Mutants debuted a full 3 years ago and is really the only modern big budget superhero film to get this treatment.The New Mutants (cont.) - The big reasons for the delays seem to be a mix of fear of tone and of course the Disney/Fox merger. When the New Mutants trailer came out people seemed genuinely excited about a potential horror first approach to superheroes but as those who have seen the film can contest the spooks, while they are there, are pretty limited. Supposedly there was a planned heavy reshoot to increase the spooky levels to downright spooky scary levels but those plans fell through when of course the Disney bought out Fox. Remember this is called "New Mutants" for a reason and the hot steamy cast and the emphasis on so far not seen comic creations was a clear way of Fox to refresh their now 20 year old X-Men franchise for a younger audience. That doesn't really fit with the whole Disney plan of scrapping all previous plans and making the X-Men fight (clicks on the random page button on the Marvel wiki) X'Hoss and (one more time) Bridget O'Hare, of course after first the (one last time) Uatu the Watcher solo film (okay that last one does sound kinda cool).The New Mutants (cont.) - So with all these delays and pushbacks it's not really likely that New Mutants would ever do well. If anything this move of releasing it purposefully only in theaters during a pandemic is kinda of a dastardly smart one. Now Disney can say "look we tried with New Mutants but clearly audiences aren't ready" and can justify more losses and pushbacks until the world is truly safe to reopen. And they can finally kill off the Fox X-Men with a quiet whimper. And look here's the thing that's frustrating about Disney, they aren't wrong in their cold calculations most of the time. New Mutants scored some pretty middling to scathing reviews and made very little impact. And it's unfortunate, especially when you consider some rather unique things about New Mutants like that it did try to make a more self-contained genre focused story or that it features front and center a queer main couple that doesn't pussyfoot around its representation so it can easily cut the scenes for homophobic countries. So farewell Fox X-Men. You were a dying breed but an interesting one with lots of insane ups and down. And god save whoever replaces Wolverine. You are fighting the biggest nerd up-hill battle my friend.Tenet - Mutants was the most interesting new release in the states but it was not the biggest story in the box office as Tenet opened internationally to a very healthy $53M, especially considering the world right now. That is pretty remarkable considering that Interstellar opened to around $85M and Inception opened to around $55M in much better times. So while certainly I think Tenet would be pushing more towards the $100M mark if it was released in normal times, it's still pretty dang good and a sign that Nolan may just weather the storm here. There's also the value of being one of the only new major films available and if New Mutants continues to flop overseas expect it to have an insanely long tail just for sheer monopolization of the market. The only major release still planned in the near future is Wonder Woman 1984 in October so it has a full month to just run the show. Plus add into that that any future countries that flattens the curve gets a nice Tenet treat as well so waves of this film could continue, IF word of mouth is good. And with complaints about a story way too convoluted and awful sound mixing it's possible Nolan may have out Nolaned himself here. Still I think this is a good sign of things to come for this film, but does not mean that Hollywood is jumping already to restart life as normal.Films Reddit Wants to FollowThis is a segment where we keep a weekly tally of currently showing films that aren't in the Top 5 that fellow redditors want updates on. If you'd like me to add a film to this chart, make a comment in this thread.As always r/boxoffice is a great place to share links and other conversations about box office news.My Letterboxd: https://ift.tt/2Q79jjT via /r/movies https://ift.tt/2YNpEx8