Movies
Eli Roth’s ‘Thanksgiving’ Slashes into $12 Million Worldwide Debut
Sixteen years after the film’s trailer premiered as part of the Grindhouse theatrical experience, Eli Roth’s slasher movie Thanksgiving carved its way into theaters over the weekend.
The rated “R” bloodbath was produced for just $15 million, a number that the film is likely to pass in the coming days. Here in the United States, Thanksgiving scared up $10.2 million in its debut weekend, with the film’s worldwide opening bringing the current total to $12.6 million.
While not exactly a massive opening weekend for Roth’s return to horror – factoring in marketing costs and other factors, Thanksgiving likely needs to hit $30 million before it starts making a profit – it’s just great to see a bloody-as-hell, old school slasher carving out a piece of the box office pie here in 2023. And most importantly, fans and critics alike are raving about the back-to-basics slasher, which currently has an 83% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes.
One has to wonder if Thanksgiving will drop significantly once the Thanksgiving holiday comes and goes this week, but Roth’s latest still has a handful of days to capitalize on the holiday theming. We’ll be keeping our eyes on this one in the coming days, so stay tuned.
The film, an expansion of Roth’s faux trailer seen in Grindhouse (2007), was released in theaters worldwide by TriStar Pictures and Spyglass Media Group (Scream).
In Thanksgiving, “After a Black Friday riot ends in tragedy, a mysterious Thanksgiving-inspired killer terrorizes Plymouth, Massachusetts – the birthplace of the infamous holiday.”
The cast for the feature length slasher movie includes Patrick Dempsey, Addison Rae, Jalen Thomas Brooks (“Walker”), Milo Manheim (Zombies), Nell Verlaque (“Big Shot”), Gina Gershon (“Chucky”), Tim Dillon and Rick Hoffman (Hostel).
Roth wrote the script with Jeff Rendell. Roger Birnbaum and Eli Roth are producing.
It was announced two years ago that filmmaking team Radio Silence (Ready or Not, Scream, Scream VI, Abigail) were working on bringing Snake Plissken back to the screen for a brand new movie based on John Carpenter’s Escape from New York for 20th Century Studios, with John Carpenter himself on board as an executive producer of the upcoming movie.
The project had originally been described as a “reboot,” but filmmakers Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett had described it as more of a “requel.” Unfortunately, the pair revealed to Comicbook.com that they’re no longer developing the requel and have parted ways with the project.
Gillett told the outlet, “We are not, unfortunately. I think titles like that bounce around for a while and I think they’ve tried to get that out of the blocks a few times. I think it’s just ultimately a tricky rights issue thing. There’s a clock on it and we just weren’t in a position to make the clock, ultimately. But who knows? I think, in hindsight, it feels crazy that we would think we would, post-Scream, step into a John Carpenter franchise. You never know. There’s still interest in it and we’ve had a few conversations about it but we’re not attached in any official capacity.”
Escape from New York was set in 1997. “When the U.S. president crashes into Manhattan, now a giant maximum security prison, a convicted bank robber is sent in to rescue him.”
In Escape from LA, also directed by John Carpenter, “Snake Plissken is once again called in by the United States government to recover a potential doomsday device from Los Angeles, now an autonomous island where undesirables are deported.”
Radio Silence is fresh off of helming gory vampire movie Abigail. It’s the third vampire movie from the Universal Monsters brand in the past year, the film scaring up $34.7 million at the worldwide box office these past few weeks. That gives it a higher worldwide gross than both The Last Voyage of the Demeter ($21.7 million) and Renfield ($26.4 million), and it’s also the most critically successful of the three vampire movies. Abigail also just landed on Premium VOD, so you can watch at home now.
Stay tuned for additional details on the Escape from New York requel, and what’s next for Radio Silence.
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