Box office preview: Blake Lively’s ‘It Ends With Us’ takes on Ryan Reynolds’ ‘Deadpool and Wolverine’

The box office is still relying heavily on “Deadpool and Wolverine” to get us through the slower month of summer, but this weekend could offer an unlikely surprise. Read on for Gold Derby’s box office preview.

After two weeks at #1 and hitting $400 million domestic, “Deadpool and Wolverine” may finally have some competition, though it’s going to be tough to beat if it’s able to make $50 million or more in its third weekend, which is definitely possible.

Who better than to take on Ryan Reynolds‘ mega-blockbuster than Reynolds’ own wife, Blake Lively, starring in the romantic drama “It Ends With Us,” based on the best-selling novel by Colleen Hoover from 2016, which sold over a million copies worldwide by 2019 but only debuted as #1 in the New York Times bestsellers list in January 2022, thanks to a surge via TikTok.

In the movie, Lively plays Lily Bloom, a woman who moves to Boston to open a flower shop and begins a relationship with a neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid (played by the film’s director, Justin Baldoni), but that relationship begins to get abusive just as Lily’s former love Atlas (Brandon Sklenar) returns to her life.

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Although Lively has been on a bit of a hiatus for the past few years while having four kids with Reynolds, she had small hits in 2018 with “A Simple Favor” ($16 million opening) and in 2015 with “The Shallows” ($16.8m opening), although 2020’s “The Rhythm Section” was an outright bomb, and that was even before COVID hit.

Popular books, particularly those geared toward younger women, have led to huge blockbusters such as the five “Twilight” movies, “The Hunger Games,” and “50 Shades of Grey” in 2015 ($85.2m opening). Clearly, the success of Hoover’s book is the main reason why this movie got made, and it’s expected to do better than Sony’s last book adaptation, “Harold and the Purple Crayon.”

The success of the movie will rely heavily on whether the millions who bought and loved the book rush out to see the movie, and it seems that the pairing of Lively with this material could prove to be quite fruitful. In some ways, Sony is taking a similar approach as it did with the Daisy Edgar-Jones drama “Where the Crawdads Sing,” which opened with just $17.3m in July 2022, but went on to gross $90.2 million domestic with huge legs. Sony is hoping that “It Ends with Us” will make more its money opening weekend, though word-of-mouth should help it have legs as well.

There are some who think that Lively’s latest might be able to beat “Deadpool and Wolverine” this weekend, but that would mean opening with over $50 million, which seems dubious to me. One thing that may hold it back is that Sony is only releasing the movie in about 3,000 theaters, which is not very wide relative to other summer blockbusters, although an opening in the low-to-mid $30 millions should definitely be doable, enough for it to open in second place.

Directed by Eli Roth (“Thanksgiving”), the video game adaptation of “Borderlands” has a stacked cast that includes Oscar winners Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Edgar Ramírez, and the voice of Jack Black. In a weird way, it’s acting as counter-programming to Blake Lively’s movie this week, since younger guys might want something to watch, too.

Besides the connection to the popular video games, this one looks a bit like James Gunn‘s “Guardians of the Galaxy” or “The Suicide Squad” although this is more like “Guardians” in that it’s PG-13, which could help get teen and 20-something males into theaters. On the other hand, it also looks a bit like Lionsgate’s recent “Boy Kills World” with Bill Skarsgård – star of Lionsgate’s “The Crow” reboot in a couple weeks – but that movie bombed quite badly.

Although “Borderlands” does have the video game connection, it definitely feels like it’s being dumped into theaters for a limited audience, potentially opening with $13 to $15 million, which would put it in a tight race for third place against “Twisters” in its fourth weekend.

German filmmaker Tillman Singer‘s “Cuckoo” is being released by Neon on Friday in an indeterminate number of theaters. It stars Hunter Schafer from “Euphoria” as Gretchen, a teen moving to a resort in the Alps with her extended family when strange occurrences. Also starring Dan Stevens and Jessica Henwick, the movie may have an advantage from having its trailer in front of Neon’s huge hit, “Longlegs,” although it’s a much stranger movie that may be a harder sell without someone like Nicolas Cage in it. Because of this, it’s likely to open in the $4 to 6 million range, probably around 7th or 8th place against “Inside Out 2.”

Also opening this weekend is the Hong Kong action film “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In,” starring Louis Koo and martial arts legend Sammo Hung. It’s also undetermined how many theaters Well Go USA might release this into, but it could open in a few hundred theaters, and this seems like the kind of action movie that could cross over beyond just Chinese-American audiences.

Lastly, Gabriel Byrne plays Nobel Prize-winning playwright Samuel Beckett in “Dance First,” directed by James Marsh (“Man on Wire,” “The Theory of Everything”), which Magnolia Pictures will give a limited release this weekend.

Check back on Sunday to see how of the above movies do at the box office.

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