Springsteen biopic opens soft as anime champ leads weekend box office

A week after opening nationwide, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is lagging behind expectations, launching in fourth place with an estimated $9.1 million domestic debut as younger audiences flocked to other releases, led by the anime feature Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc with about $17.3 million. Industry trackers said the Springsteen drama, which stars Jeremy Allen White as the musician during the writing and recording of Nebraska, drew a predominantly older crowd and trailed holdover horror title The Black Phone 2 and the romance adaptation Regretting You.

Early response suggests solid but not breakout word of mouth: the film earned a B+ from CinemaScore and sat near the low-60s on the critics’ Tomatometer as of Monday, indicators that typically point to steadier weekday business among core fans rather than rapid expansion. That pattern aligns with demographic data reported by box office analysts, who noted a heavy skew to viewers over 45, a cohort that often buys tickets later in a run but rarely delivers a front-loaded opening.

The project, written and directed by Scott Cooper and distributed by 20th Century Studios, positions itself as a quieter entry in the music-biopic wave, focusing on a solitary creative break rather than an arena-sized rise. Comparisons have been drawn to the stronger inaugural frame of the recent Dylan film A Complete Unknown, whose A CinemaScore and broader four-quadrant turnout gave it a faster start, underscoring how subject focus and tone can shape the audience corridor for artist-driven dramas. Analysts also pointed to the weekend’s crowded slate and the continuing strength of anime in North America as competitive headwinds for adult-skewing releases.

Budget reports place Deliver Me From Nowhere in the mid-$50 million range before marketing, setting a high bar for profitability in domestic theaters and increasing reliance on overseas play and downstream windows. With global receipts around $16 million through Sunday, the film will now look to older-audience legs, awards-season attention, and platform availability to improve its trajectory while remaining in the market against November genre entries and holiday tentpoles.