Sony’s Teenage Demon Hunter Beats Out Springsteen at Weekend Box Office

Disney’s “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” debuted this weekend at fourth. (Courtesy Disney)

Key Points

• Sony’s ‘Chainsaw Man—The Movie: Reze Arc’ led the domestic box office with $17.3 million in its opening weekend.
• October sales are down 6% compared with last year, increasing pressure on studios for strong holiday season releases.
• The year-to-date box office total is $6.97 billion, an increase of 3.4% from the same period in 2024.

An anime film about a teenage demon hunter and his dog beat out a Bruce Springsteen biopic and two other films to take the top slot at the domestic box office this weekend.

Sony’s Chainsaw Man—The Movie: Reze Arc opened to $17.3 million in ticket sales domestically, according to Comscore, a month after its debut in Japan. The film is a collaboration with Crunchyroll.

It beat out the second weekend for Universal’s Black Phone 2 and the debut for Paramount’s Regretting You, which came in second and third, respectively, with domestic sales of $13 million and $12.8 million for the weekend, Comscore said.

Walt Disney’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere came in fourth in its debut, with sales of just over $9 million.

Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian called it another eclectic weekend at the cinemaplex, “with a diverse range of movie genres being represented.”

But after a strong summer at the box office, Hollywood has fallen short of where things stood at this point a year ago, Dergarabedian said. “Patience will be a virtue as the industry awaits the holiday season to get started in earnest in late November,” he said.

Dergarabedian said October sales are running down 6% compared with last year. That puts higher expectations on studios to deliver holiday season hits.

Focus Features will debut Bugonia, an English language remake of a South Korean sci-fi movie, in wide release next week, and Disney has Predator: Badlands set to premier in November along with Paramount’s The Running Man. Those titles “will bridge the gap between this rather slow period and the Thanksgiving holiday frame which should power solid box office momentum heading into December,” Dergarabedian said.

Hollywood brought in $74.9 million for the weekend, bringing its year to date total at around $6.97 billion, up 3.4% from the same time in 2024.

Write to Liz Moyer at liz.moyer@barrons.com