'Dune' Leads Weekend US Box Office With $40.1M: What You Need To Know

Denis Villeneuve’s science-fiction epic "Dune" topped the U.S. weekend box office with $40.1 million in ticket sales. However, the film’s commercial success was also a case of whether the proverbial glass was half-full or half-empty.

What Happened: On the plus side, “Dune” was the highest grossing 2021 release for AT&T’s T Warner Bros. division, topping the $31 million generated in April during the opening weekend of “Godzilla vs. Kong” – and it reigned at the box office despite being in simultaneous release on HBO Max.

But on the flip side, the “Dune” opening weekend total was considerably lower than the sums earned by the top grossing films of the past three weekends: “Halloween Kills” with $50.4 million (in a simultaneous Peacock streaming release), “No Time to Die” with $56 million and “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” with a pandemic-era record weekend opening of $90.1 million. Those three films ranked second, third and fourth at the weekend box office, and their continued presence in theaters clearly diluted the earning potential of “Dune.”

Still, Warner Bros. president of domestic distribution Jeff Goldstein gave a thumbs up on “Dune” and emphasized that theater owners were not disappointed by the simultaneous HBO Max release.

“Exhibitors are thrilled,” he said in a statement. “The best part is, fans are loving what they're seeing. They're loving the big-screen experience. It's been a winner of a weekend for movie-lovers.”

What Else Happened: The week’s poorest performer was the animated feature “Ron’s Gone Wrong” from The Walt Disney Co. DIS, which ranked fifth at the box office in its opening weekend with more than $7 million from 3,560 screens.

Two specialty releases scored impressive grosses from limited release: Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch” from the Disney’s Searchlight Pictures division was the ninth highest grossing film of the weekend with $1.3 million from 52 theaters in 14 markets – the film scored the best pandemic-era theater average with $25,000 per screen – while the Indian import “Honsla Rakh” absorbed $490,000 from 75 theaters to become the tenth-ranked title among the weekend’s top 10 films.

What Happens Next: Looking ahead to the Halloween holiday weekend, Searchlight Pictures is releasing the horror film “Antlers” starring Keri Russell as a schoolteacher in a small Oregon town who suspects one of her students is harboring a supernatural creature in his home. The film has been on the shelf for some time due to the pandemic – it was shot in October and November of 2018 and slated for a release in April 2020 and then last February before getting its big screen premiere this coming weekend.

Also opening is “A Mouthful of Air” from Sony’s SONY Stage 6 Films division, with Amanda Seyfried playing an author who confronts a traumatic secret after the birth of her second child. Amy Koppelman directed the film and adapted the screenplay from her best-selling novel.

Comcast’s CMCSA Focus Features is releasing “Last Night in Soho,” a British psychological horror film about a young fashion designer who time travels back to the 1960s and occupies the body of a singer whose glamorous stage presence is decidedly more harrowing out of the spotlight. And Funimation Films is offering “My Hero Academia: World Heroes’ Mission,” the latest entry in the anime franchise based on the superhero manga best-sellers.

Three independently-produced and -released documentaries will be in limited theatrical engagements this coming weekend: comics Bobcat Goldthwaite and Dana Gould hit the Southern roads and engage in a mix of soul-searching and joking in “Joy Ride,” the infamous 1971 upstate New York prison uprising is recalled in “Attica” and the musical career of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, a Black transgender septuagenarian, is highlighted in “Keyboard Fantasies.”

Also Happening: Last month, a first edition of Mary Shelley’s Gothic horror novel “Frankenstein” sold at auction for $1.17 million. Shelley’s 1820 masterpiece inspired a seemingly endless number of film adaptations, and many will be screened over the Halloween weekend.

In case you are wondering where the cinematic “Frankenstein” odyssey began, it started in the least likely place: Thomas Edison’s film production studio in the Bronx, New York, in 1910, with Charles Ogle starring a rather hirsute monster. This “Frankenstein” was believed to have been lost for many years, but a surviving print has been preserved, and a restored HD version can be seen online:

Photo: Zendaya in "Dune," courtesy of Warner Bros.