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APEX Hollywood Shortlist: James Bond Takes Out Charlie Brown and an Unstoppable Martian to Claim the Top Spot with $73M

November 9, 2015  | Written by Tomas Romero

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APEX Insight: Jolting the box office back to life after last week’s sleepy holiday hangover, James Bond and Charlie Brown pack a powerful one-two punch over the weekend with an estimated $73M and $45M respectively.

In his fourth and possibly final appearance as James Bond, Daniel Craig 007-ed his way to a spytastic $73M in Spectre. Though Skyfall fared a bit better when it opened in the same time frame three years ago with $88.3M, the fact that Spectre recently broke UK box office records – the title overtook Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban last week to become the biggest UK debut of all time with £41.7M ($63.8M USD), and has already picked up an estimated $296.1M worldwide – bodes well for the franchise moving forward.

Especially if team Bond keeps staging such epically cool aviation-themed set pieces! As if the fight staged in an out-of-control helicopter flying just 30 feet over a crowd of 1,520 extras in Mexico City’s Zócalo wasn’t enough, Spectre also features a jaw-dropping plane crash in the Austrian Alps that required the use of eight airplanes, dozens of stuntmen and roughly 440 tons of man-made snow. I’m not sure either scene will make the cut when Spectre hits in-flight entertainment screens, but, if the chatter on social media is any indication, both scenes will be leaving audiences shaken and stirred for weeks to come.

Also opening big in second place was The Peanuts Movie which Snoopy danced its way to an estimated $45M. And though many longtime Peanuts fans worried that the 3-D computer-animated reboot of the beloved comic strip and animated TV specials would be cause for endless choruses of “good grief,” Charlie Brown and friends outdid themselves once again.

The fact that the film was written by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz’s son Craig and grandson Bryan (with Cornelius Uliano) and features archival voice recordings of the late, great Bill Melendez reprising his dual roles as Snoopy and Woodstock, surely doesn’t hurt. And in a bit of truly meta casting, the role of Snoopy’s love interest in the film, Fifi, the poodle, is voiced by Kristin Chenoweth who won a Tony in 1999 for playing Charlie Brown’s sister, Sally, in the Broadway revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. But if you ask me, the biggest selling point for this one is finally getting a chance to see Pigpen’s swirling, ever-present dirt cloud in 3-D. Whoo-hoo! Bring on the pixilated CGI dust storm!

And with Oscar chatter picking up speed, a handful of potential contenders opened in limited release over the weekend as well. The most controversial was Spotlight, which opened with an estimated $302.2K in five theaters for a very newsworthy per screen average of $60.4K. Director Tom McCarthy’s searing, real-life drama about the team of hard-charging Boston Globe reporters who broke the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal wide open in 2002, stars former Oscar nominees Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton and Stanley Tucci with stellar supporting turns from Rachel McAdams and Tony winner Liev Schreiber as real-life Boston Globe editor Marty Baron. A much buzzed-about hit on the festival circuit since it premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival in September, Spotlight looks like a definite front-runner for Best Picture and any number of acting nods, so, expect the award season spotlight to stay on, well, Spotlight, for the duration.

Weekend Box Office Estimates: November 6-8, 2015