The Blackening brought laughs to theaters and rang up an estimated $6 million in ticket sales at the Juneteenth holiday weekend box office.
The film played in 1,775 theaters for a per location domestic average of $3,380, according to industry tracking company Comscore.
Yet the horror comedy only managed a sixth place finish, far behind this weekend’s champion, The Flash, which earned $55.1 million at the box office.
Elemental debuted in second place with $29.5 million. Among the holdovers, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was third with $27.8 million. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts was fourth with $20 million, and The Little Mermaid rounded out the top five with $11.6 million.
Related Story: ‘The Flash’ Underwhelms With $55.1 Million at Box Office – After Long Road to Release
While The Blackening opened behind the competition, the film made back its reported $5 million production budget in three days.
The Lionsgate release is projected to earn a total of $7.0 million by the end of Monday’s holiday.
The story follows a group of Black friends who reunite for a Juneteenth getaway. But their holiday weekend turns into a nightmare when they end up trapped inside a cabin with a killer who forces them to play a racially offensive trivia game called “The Blackening.”
The cast includes Grace Byers, Jermaine Fowler, Melvin Gregg, X Mayo, Dewayne Perkins, Antoinette Robertson, Sinqua Walls, Jay Pharoah, and Yvonne Orji.
The movie is directed by Tim Story (Think Like a Man), and co-written by Tracy Oliver (Girls Trip) and Dewayne Perkins (Brooklyn Nine-Nine).
The comedy received a healthy “B+” CinemaScore in exit polling from audiences. Meanwhile, critics gave it a “certified fresh” 86 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Valerie Complex wrote in Deadline’s review of the film, “The Blackening is hands-down one of the best comedies of the year.”
Tim Cogshell of The AV Club gave the film a “B” and wrote, “The movie is highly entertaining, while being oddly validating and very funny.”
Peyton Robinson of RogerEbert.com gave the movie three and a half stars and wrote, “An unapologetically Black comedy through and through. It maintains its wit and bite to the very end, boastfully serving audiences a hilarious film we didn’t know we needed.”
But Carla Hay of Culture Fix was not impressed with the film and wrote in her review, “The Blackening tries very hard to combine the parody of Scary Movie and the social commentary of Get Out, but the results are mostly cringeworthy, unimaginative, and not very funny. The ending of the movie also drags and has no suspense.”
The Blackening premiered in September at the Toronto International Film Festival. After a bidding war, Lionsgate acquired the film from MRC for about $20 million, Deadline reported.
The movie is based on a 2018 short film by the same name from comedy troupe 3Peat. The story skewers horror movie tropes — and the idea that Black characters often get slashed first — by posing the question: If the entire cast of a horror movie is Black, then who dies first?
Shawn Edwards, film critic for Fox 4 News in Kansas City, Missouri and executive producer of the Critics Choice Association’s “Celebration of Black Cinema & TV,” told Urban Hollywood 411 the film was never expected to bring in huge crowds, adding that it performed “as expected.”
“Let’s be honest, this is a film for us by us,” Edwards said Sunday. “It will get a lot more attention once it hits the home market.”
Personally, I found The Blackening funny at times, yet tiresome.
Between the constant use of the N-word and the plot twist involving the killer at the end (which didn’t exactly add up), I was glad when the credits finally rolled.
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