It wasn’t quite the opening weekend that Warner Bros. wanted for They Will Kill You, to put it delicately. Despite rolling out the red carpet for director Kirill Sokolov’s latest, including a splashy premiere at SXSW in Austin, Texas this year, the bloody action/horror flick didn’t live up to expectations at the box office.
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The movie, which stars Zazie Beetz (Bullet Train) in the lead role, opened to an estimated $5 million domestically over the weekend, which put it at number three on the charts. Heading into the weekend, tracking suggested it could make as much as $10 million. Needless to say, this isn’t a great result. It came in well behind Project Hail Mary ($54.5 million), which held very strong in its second weekend, and Pixar’s Hoppers ($12.2 million), which has demonstrated long legs.
It didn’t help that Ready or Not 2: Here I Come also landed at number six with $4 million. While the sequel didn’t hold all that great following its debut last weekend, the movie has a similar “eat the rich while covered in blood” premise, at least on the surface.
Internationally, They Will Kill You added another $4 million for a $9 million global star. The good news here is that the movie carries a mere $20 million production budget. Word of mouth should be decent, which means as long as it doesn’t totally fall off a cliff in the coming weeks, at that price, it should easily be able to make its money back on VOD/streaming. Critics were mixed-to-positive on it, with Fango’s review calling it “familiar but satisfying.” It was an admirable swing that just didn’t quite connect, unfortunately.
The movie centers on a desperate woman named Asia (Zazie Beetz) who answers a cryptic ad for a live-in housekeeper at a luxurious New York City high-rise. Soon after, she discovers that the building has a sinister history. Residents have been vanishing without trace for decades, with a Satanic cult lurking in the shadows. The cast also includes Patricia Arquette (True Romance), Tom Felton (Harry Potter) and Heather Graham (Suitable Flesh).
Looking ahead, the upcoming week will be dominated by The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which opens on Wednesday. It will be the biggest American movie of the year by next Monday. The next big release for horror fans comes in mid-April when Lee Cronin’s bold new take on The Mummy arrives. That takes us to May, where there will be plenty of genre fare mixed in with the usual summer blockbusters.
They Will Kill You is in theaters now.
