‘Ghostbusters: Afterlife’ Opens With $44M

Hollywoodreporter.com: Ghostbusters: Afterlife has restored the luster to Sony’s supernatural franchise.

The holiday tentpole easily topped the weekend chart with a better-than-expected $44 million from 4,315 theaters at the North American box office after succeeding in luring both families and males, the most avid moviegoers in the pandemic era.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife‘s performance is a big win for Sony, which was haunted by its failure to revive the franchise with the 2016 female-skewing Ghostbusters. The studio is counting on big business throughout Thanksgiving week and next weekend.

Overseas, Afterlife started off with $16 million from 31 markets for a worldwide launch of $60 million.

The new film is directed by Jason Reitman and is a sequel to the iconic 1984 movie Ghostbusters, which was directed by his dad, Ivan Reitman.

On Saturday, over 33 percent of the audience saw the movie before 4 p.m., indicating a strong turnout among and parents and their kids (children over 5-years-old can now be vaccinated), according to analytics firm EntTelligence.

And, according to PostTrak, nearly 50 percent of the audience was between the ages of 25 and 44, while 57 percent of ticket buyers were male.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife stars Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace, Annie Potts and Paul Rudd, and follows what happens when a single mom and her two kids arrive in a small town and begin to discover their connection to the original ghostbusters and the secret legacy their grandfather left behind. The film earned an A- CinemaScore from audiences.