‘Red One’ Flies Low to $30 Million Box Office Opening

Amazon MGM’s “Red One” is flying low at the box office, earning $10.9 million from 4,032 theaters on Friday as it is estimated for a $30 million opening.

That’s on the low end of pre-release projections of $30-34 million, which itself was a bleak outlook for this $250 million production that faced plenty of snafus first reported by TheWrap.

The only silver lining for “Red One” is that early audiences, many of whom are likely to be fans of lead star Dwayne Johnson, enjoyed the film to the tune of an A- on CinemaScore. That’s better than the B+ earned by Johnson’s DC film “Black Adam” in 2022.

As a streamer distributor, Amazon MGM views theatrical releases as a springboard for increased attention to their films on Prime Video and other home platforms. Since acquiring MGM last year, Amazon has focused its theatrical slate on low-to-mid-budget titles like “Challengers” and “My Old Ass,” but “Red One,” which was originally greenlit for a streaming release, marks the first time since the merger that Amazon has sent a tentpole-budget film into theaters.

But “Red One” faces an uphill battle to leg out in theaters given major competition from films like Universal’s “Wicked,” Paramount’s “Gladiator II,” and Disney’s “Moana 2” over the next two weeks. Even a lengthy box office run as a Christmas title will not make the film profitable from theatrical grosses alone, and its return on investment as a streaming title will be much more abstract and based on confidential viewership data.

Overall grosses will be in the $65-70 million range, a range that the box office has not fallen to since April. Sony’s “Venom: The Last Dance” will take the No. 2 spot with an estimated fourth weekend total of $6.5 million, while Lionsgate’s “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” is holding decently in its second weekend with $5 million.