Coulrophobia Strikes the Movies League

This is the latest edition of the Movies Fantasy League newsletter. The drafting window for this season has closed, but you can still sign up to get the newsletter, which provides a weekly recap of box-office performance, awards nominations, and critical chatter on all the buzziest movies.

We’re only two weeks into the MFL season, and I’m already sending this newsletter out hat in hand because the film industry has thrown me a curveball. Terrifier 3 just topped the box-office charts with a whopping $20 million haul as America stated its preference for Art the Clown over Art…hur Fleck the clown prince of crime. We’ll get into Joker: Folie à Deux falling precipitously down the box-office ranks momentarily. For now, let’s start with a mea culpa: Terrifier 3’s big, triumphant weekend won’t earn anyone MFL points because the film wasn’t available to be drafted. That one’s on me, folks.

The first two Terrifier movies operated completely beneath my radar, perhaps a function of my psyche’s innate defense mechanism to keep these defiantly over-the-top gorefests out of my life. I like horror movies, but as you know if you’ve browsed any streaming platform’s horror offerings, the ratio of “low-budget trash you don’t need to care about” to “low-budget trash that’s worth watching” can be very high; word of mouth matters a lot, and there weren’t a lot of mouths telling me I’d like the Terrifier movies. It was only a few weeks ago I finally had somebody tell me about these movies and their clown-faced protagonist. That’s when the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon kicked in, and I started noticing the franchise kind of everywhere, from social-media conversations to Google results. I still don’t intend to see these movies, but that’s fine. The film industry works better when there are movies that attract pockets of fandoms I’d never claim as my own and make money off of them. (Dinesh D’Souza excepted.) Good for Terrifier 3 and its merry band of sickos buying tickets to see it! I’m just sorry it wasn’t available to be drafted. I live, I learn, I forgive myself, I move on.

Box Office Updates

Aside from freaky-faced clowns doing arts and crafts with the internal organs of their victims, this weekend’s box office was kind of dud-coded. The two major wide-release debuts were the Pharrell Williams documentary-in-Legos Piece by Piece and director Ali Abassi’s The Apprentice, about the rise to power of someone called Donald Trump. Piece by Piece’s $3.85 million yield was good for fifth place, behind Terrifier 3, the third weekend of The Wild Robot, the sixth weekend of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and the turkey carcass that is Folie à Deux. Perhaps if more people knew there would be a Lego Wicked trailer, things might have turned out better. But fifth place is better than tenth, which is where The Apprentice ended up, earning just $1.6 million on over 1,700 screens. So, yes, that means the rosters that have The Apprentice as their only active film so far will enter the standings with one point.

Meanwhile, Saturday Night expanded into wide release but only pulled in $3.4 million on 2,300 screens, which is bad news for everything from Gen-X nostalgia to my hope that Gabriel LaBelle and Cooper Hoffman will get cast in a series of buddy comedies where they take turns being the stressed pragmatist and the idealistic genius.

As for Joker … ouch. A fourth-place showing, with only $7 million on the weekend and a $51 million two-week cumulative. A lot of you picked this movie, and I imagine you’re already regretting it, so I don’t mean to rub salt in the wound, but this is one of the bigger faceplants we’ve seen in a while. Remember how we were all dunking on The Marvels last year for hitting MCU rock bottom? That movie had $64 million after two weeks. And given how the awards-season craft nominations that go to blockbusters tend to go to financially successful blockbusters, I wouldn’t count on awards season to bail this movie out. On the bright side … I mean, you probably didn’t stub your toe today. So appreciate that.

(On the actual bright side: Joker crossed the $50 million threshold, good for 15 bonus points.) Here’s your leaderboard as it currently stands:

Podcasters Assemble

The Podcast Division of the MFL is also up and running, with representatives from podcasts like Miami Nice, We Hate Movies, Extra Hot Great, Scott Hasn’t Seen, and Unspooled currently hanging out atop the leaderboard. (Of course, they’re on the leaderboard because they picked Joker, so it’s a mixed blessing.)

The Podcast Division, of course, is where representatives from over 20 podcasts are fighting among themselves for pride (and prizes!). In a new MFL tradition I just invented, akin to the Super Bowl champion kicking off the new football season at home on Thursday Night Football, I got last year’s Podcasters Division champion Katey Rich — awards editor for The Ankler and co-host of the long-running Fighting in the War Room podcast — on the line to talk about how she selected her team this year, what regrets she already has, and how she plans to defeat her own Fighting in the War Room co-hosts for MFL supremacy.

Joe Reid: Katey, as the defending champion of last season’s Podcasters’ League, I wanted to begin my roster check-ins with you. I see you drafted:

Dune: Part Two ($35)
Emilia Pérez ($25)
The Piano Lesson ($10)
Challengers ($10)
Hard Truths ($8)
The Outrun ($5)
Flow ($3)
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl ($3)

Did you have an overall philosophy with making these selections, or were these just the eight movies that you were most vibing with?

Katey Rich: Let me put on my Miss MFL League Crown (why didn’t you send me a crown???) and answer these. I suspect I followed vibes more than any logic with these picks, since I did my draft immediately after Toronto and had seen so many good movies! But I knew I wanted two of the top-dollar picks plus some more wild cards to balance the ticket. Dune: Part Two, despite the lack of box-office points (more on those later) felt like a sure thing for multiple nominations, and still does. And in the $25 tier I have more faith in Emilia Pérez as an across-the-board player than Anora or Sing Sing, as much as I love all three. So after those two it was just about finding budget picks that had potential.

J.R.: Vulture’s Nate Jones talked about not wanting to crowd out certain awards categories with his picks. You, on the other hand, have gone heavy on Best Actress contenders (Marianne Jean Baptiste for Hard Truths, Karla Sofia Gascon for Emilia Pérez, Saoirse Ronan for The Outrun, even maybe a late charge to the net for Zendaya). Are you hedging your bets there a bit?

K.R.: I probably did over-index on Best Actress! However, I think Hard Truths is also competitive in screenplay, and like I said, Emilia is going to be all over awards season. I was mostly going for titles that will show up at multiple different awards shows. If Marianne Jean-Baptiste gets Gotham, Indie Spirit, Golden Globe, SAG, and Oscar nominations, that’s a ton of points to rack up, even if she’s a total dark horse to win. I am notoriously terrible at math, but I do think that adds up?

J.R.: Since you have made your selection, A24 has listed On Becoming a Guinea Fowl for 2025 (and there has been no announcement about it being selected for contention in the International Feature race at the Oscars). How bummed are you?

K.R.: Guinea Fowl will be this year’s equivalent of 80 for Brady: a movie on my roster that earns me absolutely zero points. It’s a bummer, and in hindsight I probably should have drafted I’m Still Here, which I also saw and loved at TIFF, cost $3, and actually is being submitted by its home country of Brazil for the Oscar. But oh well! Time for Flow to over-perform and make up the difference.

J.R.: You’re competing in the Fighting in the War Room mini-league this season — here’s your chance to talk some trash to your podcast co-hosts! Thoughts on Matt Patches drafting Mufasa? Dave Gonzales drafting The Life of Chuck? David Ehrlich drafting The Beast?

K.R.: Okay, so I have been razzing Matt Patches for weeks for putting way too much power in box-office points. Again, I am bad at math, but the (more or less) 350 points Sonic 3 might get from clearing $200 million can be matched by Hard Truths picking up just screenplay and Best Actress nominations throughout the season. I had Eras Tour on my roster last year, so I am not immune to the allure of box office, and I am betting I will regret not having the Gladiator 2 points. But anyway. Dave and I can together mourn our TIFF hits that didn’t make it in this year – Life of Chuck was a worthy gamble at $2, and I considered making the same pick. As for David and The Beast, a movie I have not seen — I am the person who drafted both The Outrun and Hard Truths. I appreciate a big swing.

Coming This Week

Smile 2, a horror movie I did know about, opens in wide release this weekend. The first Smile opened to $22 million in September 2022, en route to a $105 million domestic haul. Tracking for the sequel is predicting a slightly smaller opening weekend, though, so maybe we’re oversaturating the market on creepy grinning this fall.

Anora will also open in limited release, which might not be enough to move the needle yet, but considering it’s the No. 1 most-drafted movie this season, a lot of eyeballs will be on it. Perhaps an indie sensation will be born.

Questions? Feedback? Can’t find your team or mini-league on the leaderboard? Drop us a line at moviesleague@vulture.com.