Box office preview: Hayao Miyazaki returns to theaters with ‘The Boy and the Heron’

Edward Douglas
·5 min read
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This past weekend was a bit erratic with a few movies doing surprisingly better than others, but this weekend, there’s really only one new wide release, as much of December’s big holiday releases don’t hit until next week. Read on for Gold Derby’s box office preview.

The one wide release is GKIDS’ release of Hayao Miyazaki‘s latest animated feature, “The Boy and the Heron,” which has been playing in select cities but will get a nationwide release into roughly 1,800 theaters in both subtitled and dubbed versions, the latter often being the chosen format for parents with young kids. Miyazaki always gets amazing Western voice casts, this one including Robert Pattinson, Christian Bale, Mark Hamill, Willem Dafoe and many more.

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Although Miyazaki’s “Ponyo,” distributed by Disney, is still seen as his biggest box office success in North America with just $15 million, his movies always do huge business overseas with 2002’s Oscar-winning “Spirited Away” making $383 million globally – only $10 million of that came from North America. “The Boy and the Heron” has already made over $73.4 million without much in terms of marketing with the movie first being seeing by Westerners when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.

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One thing we have to remember is that Maestro Miyazaki’s entire filmography has been playing in North American theaters for the past few years via Fathom Events and other retrospective series, so he’s built quite an audience for himself with adults and kids alike, being very much at the forefront of the Anime craze in this country.

Already having a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, “The Boy and the Heron” should be good for $4 to 5 million*, but that’s during a weekend where there may be a lot of movies in that same range vying for third through seventh place. “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé” should win the weekend easily with “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” remaining in second place, but after that, it’s a bit of a crap shoot to see if “Godzilla Minus One” can bring in business from positive word-of-mouth or if it’s already done most of its business.

*UPDATE: It looks like “The Boy and the Heron” will be in over 2,200 theaters, which is quite a wide release for GKIDS, and bearing that in mind, it’s probably going to be able to make $7 million or more, which puts it into play for third place or maybe even higher depending on how much “Renaissance” and “The Hunger Games” drop this weekend.

That’s not the only movie, though, as the documentary “Waitress: The Musical” will be released nationwide on Thursday for a five-day release run, possibly longer in other places. Based on the late Adrienne Shelly‘s 2007 movie, the music and lyrics by Sara Bareilles turned “Waitress” into a hit musical when it ran on Broadway, though it also ran on London’s West End and toured the world. The show was recorded in 2021 for this film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, and it will be released by Bleecker Street with Fathom Events into an unknown number of theaters.

Also, the horror entry “The Cello,” directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (“Saw II,” “Spiral”) follows a Saudi cello player (Samer Ismail), who comes into the possession of a cello … that’s possessed. Co-starring Jeremy Irons and Tobin Bell, “The Cello” will be released into a few hundred theaters by new distributor Destiny Entertainment. It’s a bit of an experiment, being a horror film produced and mainly set in Saudi Arabia, so we’ll have to see whether American moviegoers check it out.

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After receiving widespread critical acclaim at various September festivals, Yorgos Lanthimos‘ “Poor Things,” starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe and more, will be released into nine theaters in select cities this Friday by Searchlight Picture. Lanthimos’ new film reunites him with Stone and his Oscar-nominated collaborator, screenwriter Tony McNamara, and it’s likely to be a true awards player, so Searchlight will probably roll this out slowly over the next few weeks.

After opening in select theaters last weekend, NEON will expand William Oldroyd‘s dramatic thriller “Eileen,” starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway, moderately into a few hundred theaters across the country. The movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival but Hathaway has been doing the talk show rounds, which should help get more people interested in this, though it’s not likely to break into the Top 10.

This weekend, NEON will also give a one-week qualifying release into New York and L.A. for Ava Duvernay‘s new film “Origin,” starring Oscar nominee Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (“King Richard”), with Jon Bernthal and Niecy Nash, before its official release in January. In the project, Ellis-Taylor plays author Isabel Wilkerson, who uses her own personal tragedy to explore the connections between slavery and the caste system in India, which she turned into her best-selling book, “Caste.”

Lotte Entertainment will also release South Korea’s Oscar selection, “Concrete Utopia,” into theaters in New York and L.A. with plans to expand wider on Dec. 15 in the midst of the shortlist voting for the Oscar International Feature category.

Check back on Sunday to see how all these movies do in a market that really doesn’t have a ton of big movies.

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