In a bit of a surprise, Sony’s romantic drama REGRETTING YOU edged out Universal’s horror movie BLACK PHONE 2 to lead all movies at this weekend’s box office. REGRETTING YOU earned $8.1M to BLACK PHONE 2’s $8.0M, despite most analysts having expected the Blumhouse horror sequel to top the charts. Go figure, romance beat horror on Halloween weekend.
Unfortunately, the total box office this weekend came in at the lowest level of the year, a meager $49.8M. The last time grosses came in below that was 20 months ago, from February 9-11, 2024, when only $37.0M came in over Super Bowl weekend.
While we’ve come to expect that Halloween is a downtime for moviegoing, one particular challenge is that the night of trick or treating fell on Friday, driving down movie attendance on what is usually the second biggest day of the week after Saturday. The last time that Halloween fell on a Friday was in 2014.
Last year, with Halloween coming on Thursday, a total of $71.6M was generated from Friday, November 1, to Sunday, November 3, with VENOM: THE LAST DANCE leading all movies with $25.9M in its second weekend. Theatres will have a better result next weekend, with the opening of Disney and 20th Century’s PREDATOR: BADLANDS.
FIRST PLACE
Sony’s romantic drama REGRETTING YOU finished in first place with $8.1M, a drop of -41% from last weekend’s opening. This brings its 10-day totals to $27.5M domestically and $50.8M worldwide. Even with it being the top movie of the weekend, the actual amount of business it has done should be a cause for concern at Sony.
This movie has earned only 28% of the $97.6M domestic box office that IT ENDS WITH US earned last year, the previous feature film to be based on a novel by Colleen Hoover. In fact, REGRETTING YOU is in danger of losing money on its theatrical release, needing $75M worldwide to break even.
Two more movies based on Hoover’s novels are in the works, with REMINDERS OF HIM from Paramount due to be released on March 13, 2026, and VERITY from Amazon MGM Studios with a release date on October 2, 2026. It would be disappointing to see those two films generate results that are closer to REGRETTING YOU than IT ENDS WITH US.
REGRETTING YOU vs. IT ENDS WITH US after 10 Days
SECOND PLACE
Universal and Blumhouse’s BLACK PHONE 2 finished in second place with $8.0M in new ticket sales this weekend, a drop of 38% from last weekend. This brings its 17-day total to $63.5M domestically and $104.7M worldwide. BLACK PHONE 2 was the only significant movie in theatres over October that performed acceptably.
That said, we think that it has very little juice remaining and will fade quickly as November’s new releases arrive. Because Blumhouse maintains tight control over its film budgets, its ratio of worldwide box office to production budget is already at 5 to 1, which is twice the 2.5 to 1 ratio at which most films become profitable.
Even if BLACK PHONE 2 winds up with a slightly lower box office than the original, a third installment is likely, perhaps with a June or July release date to give it a chance to benefit from the larger moviegoing audience in the summer.
BLACK PHONE 2 vs. THE BLACK PHONE after 17 Days
THIRD PLACE
Last weekend’s top movie, CHAINSAW MAN – THE MOVIE: REZE ARC, fell back to third this weekend with a box office of $6.0M, a decline of 67%. This brings its 10-day total to $30.8M domestically and $180M worldwide, demonstrating the global appeal of the anime title. While CHAINSAW MAN has not quite matched the results of the film we have chosen to compare it to, DEMON SLAYER: MUGEN TRAIN, its performance in North America and worldwide should give its studio producers at MAPPA the confidence to make more CHAINSAW features.
CHAINSAW MAN vs. DEMON SLAYER: MUGEN TRAIN after 10 Days
FOURTH PLACE
Focus Features’ BUGONIA expanded to 2,043 theatres this weekend, and finished in fourth place by selling $4.8M, a 576% increase from the $710K it earned in its limited introduction last week. The film is a remake of the 2003 South Korean cult film SAVE THE GREEN PLANET! by Jang Joon-hwan.
The title BUGONIA comes from the ancient Greek word “βουγονία” (bougonia), which referred to a mythological ritual in which bees were said to generate from dead animals (especially oxen) spontaneously. The film was directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, who guided last year’s POOR THINGS to eleven Academy Award nominations and seven Oscar wins.
Emma Stone, who won Best Actress for her role as Bella Baxter in POOR THINGS, reunites with Lanthimos in BUGONIA. Her character, Michelle Fuller, is the CEO of a major pharmaceutical company (named Auxolith), who is kidnapped by conspiracy-obsessed individuals who believe that she is an alien. The film’s themes include greed and malfeasance by a pharmaceutical company, conspiracy culture, environmental collapse through the bee motif, alien invasion, and concerns over humanity’s ultimate fate.
The film uses a mixture of genres: absurdist sci-fi, black comedy, horror, and good old-fashioned corporate thriller. Lanthimos suggests that the dystopian themes in his movie reflect real-world concerns rather than pure fiction. The kidnappers are played by Jesse Plemons (from KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON in 2023) as Teddy Gatz and Aidan Delbis as Don. This is Aidan’s first role as a professional actor.
Lanthimos is known for his intense style of direction, pushing his actors beyond their comfort zones. Famously, Emma Stone was asked to appear nude in many scenes from POOR THINGS, and in BUGONIA, she has a shaved head to represent her character after being kidnapped and accused of being an alien. Lanthimos and Stone agreed that she would wear wigs for months during the filming, so she could shock her fellow cast members when suddenly revealing her shaved head.
Critics have a mostly positive view of Lanthimos, and the Rotten Tomatoes grades of his last two films are very similar, with BUGONIA receiving 86% rating and POOR THINGS securing a 92%. Audiences have responded with good but somewhat lower scores, 83% and 80% respectively. Here is a sample of comments from critics about BUGONIA. Variety calls it “a wild and galvanizing suspense thriller of action and ideas…” AP News says it’s a “darkly comic gut punch” that brings Lanthimos’s surreal style into a disturbingly real setting. The Los Angeles Times opines, “It’s Emma Stone’s planet now,” with a performance that’s shrewd, silly, frail, and frightening. The Washington Post describes it as “a shock to the system,” steeped in both absurdity and humanity.
After the commercial success of POOR THINGS, Lanthimos was given an estimated $50M to make BUGONIA, the highest budget of his career. This translates to a threshold for profitability at $125M in worldwide gross. Since POOR THINGS had a worldwide gross of $117.6M, BUGONIA would need to produce the director’s highest-grossing film ever.
Focus Features is the distributor of record for both POOR THINGS and BUGONIA, and has taken a different approach this time by beginning with a limited 17-theatre introduction and then quickly expanding to 2,043 in weekend #2.
With POOR THINGS, Focus started smaller with a 9-theatre opening and expanded slowly from that point, touching 82 theatres in week two and 800 in week three. POOR THINGS did not reach 2,000 theatres until its eighth week, relying heavily on word of mouth and pre-Oscar buzz. This time, the distributor is attempting to cash in early by leveraging the reputations of Lanthimos and Stone.
BUGONIA vs. POOR THINGS after 10 Days
FIFTH PLACE
Universal’s BACK TO THE FUTURE 40th Anniversary rerelease was able to secure fifth place by grossing $4.7M, and taking the film’s total for all its releases to $221.7M domestically. Released originally in 1985, the Robert Zemeckis-directed classic has become a cultural touchstone. The story centers on Marty McFly, played with effortless charm by a then-24-year-old Michael J. Fox.
He plays a California teenager who accidentally travels back in time from 1985 to 1955 with the help of a DeLorean sports car invented by his eccentric scientist friend, Dr. Emmett “Doc” Brown. Doc, played by Christopher Lloyd, is the wild-eyed genius whose invention kicks off the wild ride. When Marty arrives in the past, he bumps into his own teenage parents, with the potential to disrupt the course of the future.
McFly has to figure out how to make his parents fall in love so he doesn’t erase himself from existence. Meanwhile, he and the 1955 version of Doc have to rig up a plan to send him back to the future using the energy of a famous lightning strike at the courthouse clock tower.
The movie blends comedy, sci-fi, heart, and wish-fulfillment in a way very few films have. It plays with big ideas about destiny, family, and how small choices ripple across time, but it never loses its feel-good vibe. Critics at the time were over the moon. Roger Ebert praised its cleverness and energy; The New York Times called it “sweet, inventive, and funny.” The public reaction was absolutely euphoric, making it the highest-grossing film of 1985.
It earned $190.6M at the time, which projects out to $575.3M in current-day dollars after adjusting for inflation. Theatres were packed all summer long, turning Fox into a megastar. Audiences loved the humor, the DeLorean, and Huey Lewis’ blasting soundtrack over the incredible finale. The success of the film spawned sequels, theme-park rides, endless quotes, and generations of fans. Even now, it still feels timeless, like the cinematic equivalent of hopping into that DeLorean and speeding down life’s highway.
A NOTE ABOUT KPOP DEMON HUNTERS
Netflix returned to theatres this weekend with a re-release of its anime feature KPOP DEMON HUNTERS. After earning $18.0M in domestic box office in its two-day release on August 24-25, the streamer felt that there might still be some demand to see the sing-along hit movie in theatres.
AMC chose not to play the movie at its theatres, in a stance against Netflix’s policies on theatrical windows and exclusivity. Feeling it had lost out on an opportunity the first time around, AMC agreed to play the movie this weekend at 400 of its theatres, which include some of the highest-grossing venues in the country. The movie was also booked to play on all three days of the weekend, instead of the two-day run last time.
Netflix’s strict refusal to report theatrical grosses to Comscore, the industry’s standard for tracking box office, makes it impossible to rank the performance of the film, at least officially. Nonetheless, a few industry sleuths have attempted to peg its box office, suggesting that it earned around $5.3M over the past three days, which would have made it fourth on the list of movies.
We’re not entirely sure why Netflix chooses to restrict reporting of the theatrical gross of its movies, since it makes them appear tentative or concerned about the results. This issue will come up again with the November 26th release of Netflix’s WAKE UP DEAD MEN, the next entry in the KNIVES OUT franchise. We encourage Netflix to allow theatres to report their results to Comscore.
Next year, Netflix’s prime streaming competitor Amazon will be releasing PROJECT HAIL MARY on March 20th. This far out, that film is seen as having the potential to be one of the highest-grossing films of 2026, with the potential to be considered for the industry’s major awards. Certainly, Amazon will be forthcoming on the box office successes of the picture and enjoy the benefits that come along with that notoriety.
Where Are We as of 10/30/2025
After 43 weeks, the 2025 domestic box office stands at 103% compared to the same point in 2024 and 75% compared to 2019.
