In a surprise to pretty much no one, a New Line Cinema horror movie performed well at the box office on Friday. The 1970s-set thriller The Curse of La Llorona—which is kinda-sorta-not-really a Conjuring-verse movie—pulled in $11.8 million on Friday at the box office and is heading for a weekend tally around $25 million. That’s above expectations for the pic, which has struggled critically and earned only a B- CinemaScore from audiences. No matter, the Conjuring-verse spinoff The Nun was a box office smash and that movie bombed with critics.
It’s a slow weekend overall as studios are wary of launching anything major a week before Disney drops Avengers: Endgame, which is sure to dominate the box office for weeks to come and will pretty much edge out everything next week. That said, Warner Bros.’s DC film Shazam! still performed well on Friday, grossing $6.2 million on its way to a global box office total above $300 million after three weeks in release.
Image via 20th Century Fox
The other major new release this weekend, the faith-based drama Breakthrough, scored $3.8 million on Friday for a total of $7.3 million since its official release on Wednesday. The Fox 2000 film is the first Fox movie to hit theaters following Disney’s official acquisition of the 20th Century Fox film studio and its subsidiaries. Of note, Disney has since shuttered the Fox 2000 label despite signaling last year that the Mouse House planned on keeping the YA and specialty-focused studio intact.
So yeah, it’s a pretty quiet weekend as the calm before the storm arrives. Horror movies generally have pretty steep drop-offs in subsequent weeks, so New Line/Warner Bros. made a pretty smart play by dropping The Curse of La Llorona here, unafraid of lower-than-usual return business next weekend while everyone’s busy seeing Avengers: Endgame for the third, fourth, or fifth time.
Come back tomorrow for the full weekend breakdown, and start getting those Endgame predictions ready. It’s nearly here, folks.
Here’s the Friday Top 5 box office:
| Rank | Title | Friday | Total |
| 1. | The Curse of La Llorona | $11,800,000 | $11,800,000 |
| 2. | Shazam! | $6,155,000 | $110,156,951 |
| 3. | Breakthrough | $3,811,000 | $7,317,925 |
| 4. | Captain Marvel | $3,145,000 | $394,071,133 |
| 5. | Little | $2,890,000 | $23,819,410 |