‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ To Scare Off Na’vi From No. 1 With $20M+ MLK Opening – Box Office Preview

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is finally set to be released in the theaters this weekend.

via: Deadline

So Sony’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is still looking at a $20M+ 4-day opening at 3,400 sites in North America, finally unseating 20th Century Studios’ Avatar: Fire and Ash from No. 1 in its 5th frame. That movie is looking like $18M-$19M over the MLK holiday weekend.

Previews for Bone Temple start at 2 p.m. Thursday in 2,900 sites. Avatar 3 still has the Imax theaters and majority of PLFs, while the Infected (don’t call them zombies) have some PLF screens.

The best heat in first choice for Bone Temple is from guys over 25. The movie’s temperature on tracking in first choice is about as hot as New Line’s Evil Dead Rise ($24.5M in 2023) and Focus Features’ Nosferatu ($21.6M 3-day in 2024) and way hotter than Paramount’s Primate ($11.1M opening last week). 28 Years Later benefited from previews on Juneteenth, which propelled the Danny Boyle horror threequel to a $30M opening last summer — one of the best for horror in 2025 — and a domestic of $70.4M, global of $151.3M. Production cost of Bone Temple was $63M net, while 28 Years Later was $60M net before global P&A spend.

There’s no Rotten Tomatoes critics score on Bone Temple yet, but the last 28 Years Later did 89% with critics, 63% with audiences, a B CinemaScore and an OK 52% definite recommend on Screen Engine/Comscore’s PostTrak, with a big turnout by men over 25 at 49% followed by 26% women over 25.

Overseas, Bone Temple unseals itself Wednesday in the UK, France, Belgium and Indonesia, then in Australia/New Zealand, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Italy, Netherlands and Saudi Arabia on Thursday, followed by Japan, Poland and Spain on Friday. That’s a 98% offshore footprint, except Korea and Thailand.

MLK used to be a time when studios would put the pedal to the metal in mid-January, but the Nia DaCosta directed, horror sequel penned by Alex Garland penned and produced by Boyle is the only major studio release, a la 2022, when Paramount opened Spyglass/Dimension’s reboot of Scream to $33.8M. What gives? There’s no counterprogramming. Last year, Sony had the sleeper R-rated comedy One of Them Days, which bowed to $11.8M and did something of a near 5x multiple to $50M stateside. This year, it looks like everyone largely was avoiding Avatar: Fire and Ash, expecting that movie to eat up everything. Back in 2023, Avatar: The Way of Water led the MLK box office in its fifth weekend with $39.88M, the best 4-day for the MLK stretch post-Covid. That weekend, Lionsgate opened the Gerard Butler actioner Plane to $11M, while Warner Bros had New Line’s House Party at $4.6M.

Expanding this weekend are Focus Features’ Hamnet, from 232 to around 500 sites after its Golden Globe wins for Best Feature Drama and Best Actress (Jessie Buckley), and Row K’s Gus Van Sant crime thriller Dead Man’s Wire with a wide break to north of 1,000 theaters in Weekend 2. The expectation is around the low single digits over four days for that distrib’s first theatrical release, which it scooped out of TIFF for the mid-seven-figure range. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet counts a current domestic cume of $12.9M, with global north of $17M.