‘Barbarian’ to lead one of the year’s worst weekends at the box office

The box office hit a slump this week with its second-lowest performing weekend of the year despite Disney rolling the dice on the critically lauded horror film, Barbarian.

That movie, directed by Zach Cregger and starring Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård and Justin Long, pulled in $3.8 million on Friday following an $850k haul on Thursday night in previews. At its current trajectory, it’s headed to potentially make low double digits, according to Deadline.

Disney eschewed its normal practice of sending movies straight to streaming services mostly because the test screenings for the movie went so well and critics seemed to respond well to it (it has a Tomatometer rating of 92 percent with critics). Here’s the synopsis for the film: “A young woman discovers the rental home she booked is already occupied by a stranger. Against her better judgment, she decides to spend the night, but soon discovers there’s a lot more to fear than just an unexpected house guest.”

Disney is hoping the movie’s reach will grow through word-of-mouth, but audience scores are about 20 percent lower than critics scores, hovering at around 75 percent.

Another movie opening this weekend is Disney’s Star Studios movie, Brahmastra Part One: Shiva. It’s not necessarily the most well-known property stateside, but it is the equivalent of a Marvel movie in India. It has made $1.9 million so far and is expected to hit almost $5 million. The prints of the movie are in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam.

Finally, Lifemark from Fathom opened in the top 10 as well. It’s a faith-based movie from Kirk Cameron. Here’s the logline: “David’s comfortable world is turned upside down when his birth mother unexpectedly reaches out to him, longing to meet the 18-year-old son she’s only held once.”

The movie is estimated to gross about $2.2 million by the end of the weekend. These numbers highlight how slow things are for the box office this weekend, which is going to end up being the second-slowest weekend of the year so far behind Jan. 28-30. That period saw a box office of $34.9 million.