Ho ho oh no: ‘Red One’ fails to take flight for Dwayne Johnson

Hello! Welcome to The Box Office Report for the weekend of Nov. 15-17, 2024.

1. Red One

Weekend gross: $34.1M
Total domestic gross: $34.1M
Last weekend: New release
Percent drop: NA

Not a great debut for Dwayne Johnson’s Christmas movie. I guess there’s a reason that Red One was originally targeted as a direct-to-streaming movie, but when you spend $200 million to make a movie, you need to try to get some of that back at the box office.

It’s not a shock that Red One performed so poorly its opening weekend. (A debut in the $30 million range is OK when you’re a film like The Wild Robot. It’s not great when, once again, it cost $200 million to make a movie.) The reviews have been dismal, and it feels like Johnson had the blinders on when it came to the quality of the film.

“I watch Oppenheimer. It was amazing, but I was thinking: ‘Holy shit. Red One on this screen and with this technology could be game over,’” Johnson said in a recent rave over IMAX films. “I remember texting [director Jake Kasdan] a picture of my bare chest and a picture of the screen and we realized how cool [IMAX] would be.”

This really feels like a “this could be my Star Wars” moment.

2. Venom: The Last Dance

Weekend gross: $7.4M
Total domestic gross: $127.6M
Last weekend: 1st
Percent drop: 54

The good news for Venom: The Last Dance? Its domestic box office haul has easily passed Madame Web ($43.8 million) and Morbius ($73.9 million). The bad news? The third movie in the trilogy has fallen way behind the performances of its predecessors. While The Last Dance has $127.6 million through four weekends, Venom had $187.1 million and Venom: Let There Be Carnage had $182 million at the same point.