‘The Woman King’ surprises with $19 million opening

Yahoo Finance's Alexandra Canal joins the Live show to discuss box office earnings for Sony's 'The Woman King'.

Video Transcript

BRAD SMITH: Who says movie theaters are dead? Sony's "The Woman King" delivered a better-than-expected box office opening this past weekend. Yahoo Finance's Ali Canal is here to break it all down. Ali, "The Woman King," my goodness. It was crushing it this weekend at the box office.

ALI CANAL: That's right, Brad. And to steal your joke, "The Woman King," king of the box office. It was right there. I had to take it. But the film did secure $19 million in ticket sales, beating analysts' expectations by about 25%. And this was significant considering the fact that this movie wasn't a sequal, wasn't a prequel, it wasn't a superhero Marvel film. This was a unique original war drama. And we haven't seen a movie like that deliver this type of box office success in quite some time.

Of course, it doesn't hurt when you have someone like Viola Davis at the helm of this film. But the reviews were also really strong, a 95% critic score with a 99% audience score currently on Rotten Tomatoes. And if we take a look at the audience breakdown, it's interesting to see that most audience members were older. That's a demographic which has really struggled to reach those pre-pandemic levels at the box office. You're seeing 58% over the age of 35, 39% over the age of 45, and 59% were Black moviegoers, according to Sony.

So hopefully this can revive the box office. We have a pretty big lull through the fall, the next big film being "Black Panther, Wakanda Forever," out on November 11. And that backlog has caused some concerns among executives and analysts, but perhaps more of an opportunity for films like "The Woman King" to continue to rack up those ticket sales in the coming weeks.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, I mean, not a blockbuster, not part of a franchise, no superheroes, just, some, like, badass women. I love I love that.

BRAD SMITH: Yeah, totally, yeah.

JULIE HYMAN: Right? And based on a true story, exactly. Brad saw it. He gave it a thumbs-up from the Brad Smith review. All right, another media headline that you're watching, Ali. The right-leaning video sharing platform Rumble starts trading on the NASDAQ via SPAC today, via [? D-SPAC, ?] I guess you could say. RUM is the ticker. Stocks higher. It's on our trending ticker list, actually.

ALI CANAL: Yeah, shares are currently trading at around $12.38, up about 2.8%. Just to give you guys a little bit more background, on Rumble, as you mentioned, this platform is right-leaning. It was created in 2013 as an alternative to YouTube. So the purpose here was to host banned content. And currently, there are channels from a lot of controversial figures like Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, just to name a few. Currently, Rumble says it has 78 million global monthly viewers with its user base increasing by 76% year over year in the second quarter.

And it's one of those companies that's really gained traction due, in large part, to Donald Trump and his supporters' crusade against online censorship. In fact, Rumble managed the ad sales for Truth Social. That's the platform that Trump founded after he was kicked off of Twitter. And Truth Social, by the way, the fate of that company really hangs in the balance right now. Digital World Acquisition Group, the SPAC aiming to take Truth Social public, delayed its shareholder meeting to October 10th after it failed to approve a deadline extension for the deal.

So we'll see how Rumble can perform within this market and whether or not that will impact not only the future of Truth Social, but a lot of these other platforms that we're seeing come to market right now. Yeah

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, it's very interesting the seemingly different fortunes here of this company versus Truth Social, or versus DWAC, that SPAC that it's supposed to-- was supposed to. Take it over, we'll see what happens.

ALI CANAL: TBD.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, TBD. That's a good way to put it. Thanks, Ali. Appreciate it.