One Battle After Another is on course for another good weekend hold as it eyes a $200 million box office finish, while Tron: Ares appears headed for a worst-case scenario as a franchise-killing flop.
Leonardo DiCaprio stars in “One Battle After Another.”
Source: Warner
One Battle After Another By The Numbers
Entering the weekend at $145 million worldwide, One Battle After Another should add about $4 million stateside, and an additional $12 million internationally. The overseas cume could wind up a few million higher if China delivers better than expected.
This should put One Battle After Another to $160 million and beyond this weekend. The biggest newcomer is Black Phone 2, a sequel to the 2021 horror film The Black Phone which grossed $161 million off a low $16 million budget. The sequel’s budget doubled the production costs, but still count as a modest to low budget that ensures another healthy box office profit margin.
Good reviews (you can read mine here) and audience scores suggest a $25 million North American opening for Scott Derrickson’s Black Phone 2, and most international markets have the film now as well, so I expect a $40 million or better opening, with room to overperform.
Roofman, one of my favorite films of the year so far, is sadly not gaining traction with adult audiences who’ve already seen One Battle After Another. It’ll be out of theaters soon at this rate, and international sales won’t really move the needle much. Hopefully it finds the audience it deserves on home release, especially if it gets some much-deserved award season attention. Kirsten Dunst better get recognition for what I’d rate as her best performance of her career so far.
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere arrives in theaters on October 24th and will pull some of the adult target demographic away from One Battle After Another. Then, a week later, Bugonia debuts with potential to further draw part of the adult crowd.
Even so, the popularity and modern social relevance of One Battle After Another is helping drive its strong weekly holds, and unless one of the new films can hit the same buttons the resonate with audiences to a similar powerful degree, I think we’ll see One Battle make a run at $200 million by the end of its theatrical run.
The low end of outcomes should still get it close to $185 million territory, while continued overperformance would see it climbing toward a high-end in the range of $210 million or higher. The high-end would depend greatly on China’s ticket sales surprising and other upcoming films underperforming to make room for One Battle After Another to gobble up the money left on the table.
I suspect we’ll see something in the range of $195-200 million, give or take a couple of million bucks, when the dust settles and One Battle After Another’s run ends. That’s by far the biggest box office performance to date for any of writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies.
But after a production budget in the $150 million range plus marketing costs, the film isn’t going to pay for itself based on box office alone. PVOD and other ancillary markets should return enough in rentals, sales, licensing, and other merchandising to cover the spread, but that’s a difference conversation.
That said, there’s no doubt this is a win for Warner and Anderson. One Battle After Another is a prestige adult comedy-actioner from an auteur filmmaker and with a star ensemble that elevated the picture to widespread acclaim as a crowd-pleasing awards contender overperforming at the box office. The film’s reputation and performance are more than enough to guarantee a long healthy life in circulation, and upcoming nominations that will further boost its reputation and public attention on home entertainment.
The same cannot be said for Disney’s Tron: Ares. The best news it has (and it’s not much) is that it will own the IMAX screens for a while longer, and thus should at least enjoy higher margins from prestige format ticket sales, boosting its daily box office by default.
It won’t be much of a boost, however. Off a terrible $60 million opening last weekend, with a sickly $27 million international debut and $33 million domestic, Tron: Ares is going to fall hard this frame and struggle toward $25 million – that’s globally, mind you. This assume China delivers some help for Ares this weekend, otherwise the film could finish as low as $20 million for its sophomore weekend.
Tron: Ares looks to sit atop a running total of approximately $100 million in worldwide box office by close of business Sunday. But I think the final number will wind up below that figure at $98 million, with a chance of a low-end $94 million cume. It will take hard work for Ares to reach $150 million at this point, and even harder work to get anyone to invest money in another theatrical Tron film any time soon.
One Battle After Another meanwhile soldiers on, Black Phone 2 already looks like a winner, and everyone waits for November.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2025/10/17/one-battle-after-another-eyes-200-million-box-office-tron-ares-flops/
