Searchlight Pictures’ Sundance-winning original comedy Theater Camp will take in an estimated $281,172 or $46.9k per theater at six locations opening weekend — the best limited opening for the distributor since Jojo Rabbit in the fall of 2019 ($349k in five locations). That’s after the A CinemaScore film on Sunday pulled ahead of Searchlight’s The Banshees Of Inisherin four-theater debut last year.
The number’s higher than Searchlight anticipated and the demographic mix a surprise at over 50% 25-34 year-olds,” said SVP Frank Rodriguez. “We didn’t expect that. It was a young audience. We got a lot of the older demos too. It’s a great spot to be in.”
AMC Lincoln Square and Alamo Brooklyn led the way, with Theater Camp at each booking the second-highest weekend gross behind Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. It took the top spot at the Angelika. LA locations are AMC Century City, the Grove and AMC Burbank. The film expands to select markets next weekend including Austin, Chicago, Boston, Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco, Washington DC, and Toronto, then on to 600-800 locations by August.
Tony Award winner Ben Platt and Molly Gordon star as lifelong best friends and drama instructors at a rundown theater camp in upstate New York that’s imperiled when its founder (Amy Sedaris) lapses into a coma due to an unfortunate strobe-light incident. Her tech-bro son (Jimmy Tatro) arrives to run the property but he’s clueless, so staff and students band together to stage a masterpiece to keep their beloved summer camp afloat. The film, directed by Gordon and Nick Lieberman, and written by Noah Galvin, Gordon, Lieberman and Platt, based on their short, won the U.S. dramatic Special Jury Award: Ensemble at Sundance. Searchlight’s circa $8 million acquisition was one of the festival’s earliest and biggest. Also starring Noah Galvin, Patti Harrison, Nathan Lee Graham, Ayo Edebiri, Owen Thiele, with Caroline Aaron.
The biggest limited openings of the year, Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City from Focus Features and Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid from A24, both came with starry casts and massive built-in fan bases. Theater Camp reviews are good (see Deadline’s) but “there’s not the same name recognition for our stars,” Rodriquez said. Past Lives by first time director Celine Song from A24 is a better comp, opening at $58k in early June.
Timing may have helped, with the film slipping in between Mission last weekend and ahead of Barbie and Oppenheimer next.
Theater Camp producer Erik Feig is thrilled with the theatrical reception of a film that “itself is a love letter to performance. It was built for this,” he said. (The founder of Picturestart and former Lionsgate exec was also behind Cha Cha Real Smooth, which sold to Apple for $15 million at Sundance 2022.)
While acknowledging that “the world has changed dramatically from last week to this week” since SAG-AFTRA joined the WGA on the picket lines, he’s upbeat on theatrical. “People are getting back, getting used to a communal experience, having [a film] as a topic of zeitgeist conversation. And that is cool no matter what.”
