Box Office: ‘Spiral’ Saws Off $8.8 Million Debut Weekend

Spiral: From the Book of Saw topped the domestic box office by default this weekend, with a slightly underwhelming (even on a Covid-curve) $8.725 million. Yes, the R-rated, $20 million Saw sequel/revamp might have opened much closer to Saw 3-D ($24.23 million in 2010) than Hostel 2 ($8.2 million in 2007) sans Covid-specific complications. The film would be boasting a mix of old (Darren Lynn Bousman returning after directing Saw II, Saw III and Saw IV) and the new (Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson dealing with a Jigsaw copycat sans many ties to the previous eight movies) opening in a flashy pre-Memorial Day weekend frame (May 15, 2020) just as John Wick: Chapter 3 had scored a year prior.  Armed with good (for a Saw sequel) reviews, generational nostalgia for the franchise and flashy marketing, Spiral may have been the jolt the Saw franchise needed.

We’ll never know what could have been, but that’s the optimistic scenario. The equally likely “pessimistic” scenario, one that may be closer to this “What if,” is that audiences who jumped ship after the small-scale and underwhelming Saw V in 2008 (just in time to ignore the franchise-best Saw VI in 2009) weren’t coming back. The franchise was a defining horror relic of the post-9/11 era, but it came and went a decade ago and peaked back when John Boehner was still Speaker of the House. Yes, horror junkies (and critics of a certain taste and culture) appreciated the series not so much for its gross-out traps and extreme gore but for its hilariously convoluted soap opera continuity, an interconnected timeline that would precede the MCU and the modern Fast & Furious saga. But maybe regular audiences were no more nostalgic for Saw than they were for Terminator.

It’s possible that Saw fell into a Terminator Trap (a term I am just now coining). That’s when a desperate-to-survive franchise tosses off two lousy installments (Salvation and Genisys) and burns both general audiences and fans, only for both to stay home when we get a halfway decent revamp (Dark Fate). Saw 3-D and Jigsaw are (arguably) the two worst entries in the long-running Saw saga, while Spiral is among the better ones. My “hooked on true crime docs” 13-year-old daughter thinks it’s by far the best Saw ever… put that in an ad!. Yet, if you’re a fan burned by Saw: The Final Chapter and Jigsaw (a giant nothing burger of a soft reboot/sequel released in 2017), you might not be racing to theaters to see if the third time was the charm. This might help explain why Spiral couldn’t crack $10 million even on a Covid-curve.

Again, the pandemic and its related challenges (40% of theaters closed, all theaters dealing with limits on capacity and operating hours, etc.) played a role this weekend. But a 40% “fresh” from Rotten Tomatoes (just above the 39% for Saw VI), B- from Cinemascore (the scores have ranged from a C for Saw V to a B+ for Saw II), and a 2.35x weekend multiplier (normal for Saw sequels) suggests that Spiral is playing like a Saw movie, which means the low opening weekend won’t be mitigated by longer Covid-curve legs. Wrath of Man dropped a “normal” 59% this weekend after a “normal for Jason Statham” $8.1 million debut, while Mortal Kombat opened with a solid-for-Covid $23.3 million and sank like a stone. If it plays like a Saw movie, we’re looking at a domestic total essentially tied with the openings for Jigsaw ($16.6 million in 2017) and the original Saw ($18.4 million in 2004).

Lionsgate deserves kudos for going “first” theatrically during what will be a very complicated summer. Spiral might stick around against A Quiet Place part II (May 28) and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (June 4) to pull a Wonder Woman 1984-level 2.8x multiplier for a $23.5 million finish. Even Saw VI ($70 million on a $10 million budget), Saw 3-D ($134 million worldwide, including a franchise-best $87 million overseas, on a $17 million budget) and Jigsaw ($104 million/$10 million) were profitable. If the folks behind Spiral have a good pitch for Saw X (perhaps in a X-Men: Days of Future Past-like combo featuring the survivors of Spiral and the original Saw flicks), then they can spend $20 million and hope Spiral was a victim of the times. After all, with $994 million global and counting, Saw is still going to crack the $1 billion mark.