Warner Bros.’ original horror release Weapons topped the weekend box office with Monday actuals showing $43.5 million domestic and $71.8 million worldwide from 3,202 theaters, edging past Sunday estimates and confirming the film’s outperformance in a typically quiet August frame. The debut extends the studio’s streak of $40 million-plus No. 1 openings, a rare run for any distributor this year.
Audience response was notably strong for the genre: opening-night polling returned an A- grade, a signal of word-of-mouth durability that aligns with the weekend’s step-up from forecasts. Premium formats helped, with IMAX accounting for roughly $8.1 million, or about 15% of global grosses. The $38 million production enters week two having already covered its reported cost on opening weekend, a benchmark for an original, non-franchise title.
Daily breakouts underscored momentum: the film generated $5.7 million in previews on its way to an $18.2 million Friday, then held through Saturday and Sunday to land above initial studio projections. International totals reached about $28.3 million, bringing the worldwide figure to $71.8 million through Sunday.
The win came against fresh competition. Disney’s Freakier Friday opened in second with $29 million domestically, positioning the weekend as a case study in counterprogramming—horror and broad comedy both finding their audiences even as the summer calendar winds down. Industry tracking had framed Weapons as a key test of appetite for original horror at scale; the result places the film among the year’s top genre launches and contributes to a broader run of late-summer outliers bolstering theatrical attendance.
Key market signals—high audience marks, premium-format uptake and a cost basis typical of studio horror—suggest a solid runway in the near term, with competitive holdover pressure to come from other late-August releases. For now, the film’s combination of strong exits and a sizeable opening footprint points to a second weekend shaped by standard genre drops rather than front-loaded collapse.
