Halloween Kills won the domestic weekend box office with its $50.4 million debut in theaters and also secured the record for the highest-grossing opening weekend for a streaming day-and-date premiere.
As reported by Variety, Halloween Kills bested Godzilla vs. Kong's $31.6 million opening weekend – which also premiered on HBO Max on the same day as it did in theaters – and shows a possible hopeful sign for certain types of films thriving once again at the cinema.
“This genre and this particular franchise lends itself to the in-theater experience,” said Jim Orr, Universal’s president of domestic distribution. “People want to be scared together. Our core audience was eager and enthusiastic.”
Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jodie Comer, and Adam Driver's The Last Duel, on the other hand, did not fare as well and only grossed $4.8 million at the domestic box office despite having an exclusive theatrical release. The film is said have cost around $100 million to produce and now has a lot of ground to gain.
It also may show the hesitancy of those 35 and older wanting to head back to theaters, as over 50% of ticket buyers fell into that demographic as opposed to 27% of them who saw Halloween Kills. All that being said, The Last Duel took fifth place and beat out Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings' $3.54 million.
No Time to Die earned another $24.3 million in its second weekend to secure the second-place spot and saw a decline of about 56% week-over-week. This is said to be in line with the decline seen by Spectre and Skyfall in their second weeks. No Time to Die's domestic total has now reached $99.5 million. Internationally, No Time to Die brought in $54 million, bringing its global total to $447.5 million. It is on pace to pass Godzilla vs. Kong as the second highest-grossing Hollywood release of 2021 but still has a way to go to surpass F9's $716.6 million.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage secured third place with $16.5 million, bringing its domestic total to $169.1 million, and The Addams Family 2 took fourth place with $7.2 million.
In our Halloween Kills review, we said that it "delivers deliciously gory kills and nods to John Carpenter's original classic, but still feels like half a movie."
For more, check out our explainer of the film's ending with Halloween Kills' director David Gordon Green and his thoughts on what makes the perfect Michael Myers kill.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.