It isn’t every movie that can get people lining up around the block to get their heads shaved just for an early peek, but a gambit like that is just the ticket for a film like Yorgos Lanthimos‘ “Bugonia.” At least, to make this kind of movie-going into an event.
And if you’re Focus Features and it’s your first time working with Lanthimos after several films with Searchlight and A24, why wouldn’t you go all out? Adult, arthouse films with other big name directors and stars — not all of them as fun as “Bugonia” is — have been inconsistent at the box office and, with no guarantee that people will show up, so Focus needed to pull out the stops to make “Bugonia” feel like an indie event.
Through two weekends, with the film expanding into over 2,000 screens for its second weekend, “Bugonia” has now made $4.8 million this weekend and $5.8 million to date. With another $5 million abroad, the film is at $11 million worldwide. Its domestic total has already surpassed the overall domestic run of Lanthimos’ last film, 2024’s “Kinds of Kindness.” But it has also earned Lanthimos’ best opening upon going wider, even beyond that of “Poor Things” or “The Favourite.”
That said, those movies didn’t immediately jump to as many screens in Week 2 as “Bugonia” now has, so there’s not really a great apples to apples comp here. “Bugonia” has an audience score on Rotten Tomatoes that’s even slightly above “Poor Things,” though “Bugonia” had a CinemaScore of a B compared to an A- for “Poor Things.”
The hope though is that we could be talking about “Bugonia” for a while, with the film hanging around in theaters for months through the awards season. It’s exactly that second or third life that “Bugonia” needs in order to match how “Poor Things” ultimately became a long-tail hit. Both that film and “The Favourite,” according to data from Comscore, made just over $34 million domestic by the time all was said and done, with each opening late in the year and then hanging around well into March. And it was their international hauls, over 70 percent of its $117 million worldwide total for “Poor Things” in particular, that really made the difference.
Focus took the approach of capitalizing on “Bugonia’s” fall festival buzz as soon as possible. In addition to that bald screening, Focus also did a live Q&A stream with Stone and Jesse Plemons via Alamo Drafthouse theaters and some in-person Q&As in New York and Los Angeles. Then the film, in its first weekend, opened on 17 screens, which is wider than you’d usually see for a platform release of its kind. Those added screens allowed Focus to hold 35mm screenings with 13 different prints, including in Chicago, Boston, and Nashville. That buzz helped moving into this past weekend, in which the three 35mm screens in New York all managed to place among the film’s top 10 performing locations, and the rest were all in the top 50.
One other film that could be a good touchstone, though not nearly as bonkers or as bloody as “Bugonia,” is Focus’ own “Conclave” from last year. It too opened in this same window in late October and opened wide to about $6.6 million domestic. Focus kept it going strong for about a month, then scaled back in some of the doldrums of the holiday season, and then ramped things back up again in January as it picked up awards buzz. “Conclave” made nearly 90 percent of its domestic haul in that first month of wide release, but it hung around for another three months and finished with $32.5 million.
Through two weeks though, the distributor is already seeing strong repeat business on “Bugonia,” as it has the cathartic ending and cultural parallels that should keep people thinking and coming back. Just in time for you to shave your head all over again.