Despite my humble recommendation, Terminator: Dark Fate is continuing to underperform at the box office. After a tumultuous opening weekend, sales didn’t spike at all moving through the second. In fact, they took a very big hit. Surely, this isn’t a great start to a potential new Terminator trilogy, but let’s get down to the numbers.
According to a new report from Forbes, Dark Fate only scraped together $2.8 million on Friday, November 8th, marking a 73% drop from its opening on the 1st. To put that into perspective, not only is that the worst Terminator opening of the franchise, but it joins the low ranks of films like Batman V Superman, which experienced an 81% drop, and Dark Phoenix, which experienced an 83% drop, through their second Fridays.
Unfortunately, the film is only on track to make over $10 million this weekend – a 65% drop from last weekend’s $29 million intake. And to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure why it’s doing so bad.
With the current cogs of the Hollywood machine, which spits out half-hearted sequels and remakes, Dark Fate emerged as one of its better entries, despite its more-than-controversial introduction. At the time of writing, the film is sitting at a comfortable 72% on Rotten Tomatoes with an 84% audience score. I guess I’ll never understand why millions upon millions of dollars will be spent going to see movies like The Lion King and Aladdin, while hardly any will be given to better features like Dark Fate.
Nevertheless, the most recent Terminator picture isn’t likely to recover from its box office failure. Forbes estimates that the pic will conclude its domestic run with a measly sum of $65-70 million. For reference, that’s just about the same amount Rise of the Machines earned in its first five days.
