Documentary ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! with Trey Parker and Matt Stone cleaned up on one screen only in Denver and Tamil-language revenge thriller The Greatest Of All Time is the latest Indian film to pop at the North American box office with over $2 million on 530 screens for the three-day weekend and a cume of $3.5 million including previews, according to Comscore, as it sets records at home.
The Alamo Denver had Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in its biggest auditoriums with Casa Bonita showing at one 115-seater and sold out all weekend except for a a dozen or so tickets over Saturday and Sunday morning shows – meaning its $21.75k gross is about the top of what’s possible. The best per screen average for a doc post-Covid is Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s Wild Life in 2023 at over $23k each on two screens.
Casa Bonita’s afternoon and evening showings were sold out several days ahead and it had passed $15.3k in pre-sales before Friday. After the initial showtimes sold out so quickly, the theater, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Sloans Lake, added several more to keep up with the audience demand.
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The film, which follows the South Park creators on a complex and costly renovation of an iconic Mexican restaurant in their hometown, won the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival and just played at Telluride. MTV Documentary Films will roll it out to ten additional markets next weekend including New York and LA before it hits streamer Paramount+ later this month.
Also this weekend, Tamil-language film The Greatest Of All Times, known as GOAT, directed by Venkat Prabhu and staring fixture Vijay, had a notable opening as the third biggest Tamil film debut in North American.
As per usual with India fare, it’s available in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi. GOAT is Vijay’s second highest opening Stateside after Leo, according to Indian press reports. Distributed by Alerion, the sci-fi actioner hit no. 9 of the top ten. Imax reported that GOAT launched to $900k of its global box office.
Vijay is a successful elite agent who retires suddenly, choosing a quiet life. But when a past mission comes back to haunt him, he gathers his team to prevent disaster. Also stars Prashanth, Prabhu Deva, Sneha, Ajmal, Mohan, Jayaram, Laila, Vaibhav and Premgi Amaren.
And Utopia opened serial-killer thriller Red Rooms to $40.3k on 50 screens from NYC’s IFC Center to Alamos, Regals and AMCs. On the heels of a New York Times’ Critics Pick, the Rotten Tomatoes Certified Fresh film by Pascal Plante — starring Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Locas and Maxwell McCabe-Lokos — logged $12k and the top ranking at the IFC.