Ghostbusters: Afterlife is outperforming its opening weekend expectations, but it's still set to open with a smaller box office take than the 2016 reboot. Afterlife is the fourth film in the franchise that kicked off in 1984 with the surprise smash hit comedy Ghostbusters, which landed the #1 slot in the domestic box office that year. The more divisive Ghostbusters II still managed to hit #7 in 1989, and though the cinematic side of the franchise went dormant for over 25 years, the Ghostbusters continued to appear throughout the years in the form of video games, books, comics, as well as the animated series The Real Ghostbusters and Extreme Ghostbusters.
In recent years, the franchise has been brought back to live-action, first in the form of the 2016 Paul Feig reboot, which starred Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones. Although the film was a critical success, ending up Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, its box office take was substantial but not quite enough to justify a sequel off the back of its large budget. It was also hounded by social media detractors who didn't approve of women leading a Ghostbusters movie and heaped hate upon the project.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which opened in theaters this weekend, brought the franchise back to a more traditional format that is in continuity with the original films and directed by Jason Reitman, the son of the original Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman. Per The Wrap, it exceeded its original projections, which predicted the film taking in an opening weekend somewhere between $27 and $35 million. It is now projected to close the weekend with a take of $43.4 million, which is considerably stronger but still somewhat below the opening weekend of Ghostbusters 2016, which pulled in $46 million in its first three days.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife follows a single mother and her children moving to an isolated farmhouse that was owned by her father Egon Spengler. The kids soon uncover their grandfather's past as a Ghostbuster just in time as a spectral menace gets unleashed upon the town. Afterlife stars Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, and McKenna Grace, also featuring cameos from the surviving original Ghostbusters Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Ernie Hudson.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife has an interesting box office journey ahead of it. It will be playing through the Thanksgiving weekend, which is traditionally a good time for family-oriented blockbusters, but this means it will also have to contend with Disney's new animated musical Encanto, which will more than likely kick Ghostbusters off the #1 slot for the weekend. Although the current reported budget for Afterlife is about half of what was spent on the 2016 film, the film still needs to get its box office legs under it to justify another entry in this particular branch of the Ghostbusters universe.
Source: The Wrap