Paramount's New $82M Action Thriller Gets Out-Powered at the Box Office by Avengers Endgame: Encore

Studios have historically treated re-releases the way TV networks treat reruns, as cheap programming for slow weeks. They cost almost nothing to put out, and even the recent success stories like Coraline and Interstellar made their money in late August and December frames when there was little new competition. That may have finally changed with Disney’s Avengers: Endgame Encore, which opened in one of the most crowded frames of the year, faced three well-reviewed wide releases, and still beat all of them.

The strategy behind it isn’t hard to figure, as Marvel likely wants Avengers: Doomsday top of mind ahead of December. But the fallout was real, and while doing so, the film also undercut Paramount’s Heart of the Beast, an $82 million Brad Pitt survival thriller that still had to watch a 2019 Marvel movie take the weekend it was presumably positioned to win.

‘Heart of the Beast’ Lost to a 2019 Marvel Movie

Encore topped the domestic chart with $26 million while Heart of the Beast settled for third with $20 million from 3,435 theaters, also slipping behind Resident Evil‘s $23.3 million second weekend and only narrowly edging Robert Pattinson’s Primetime at $19.2 million. Globally, the gap widens considerably, with the Marvel reissue pulling $86 million worldwide against the Pitt film’s $50.1 million launch, which included $30.1 million from 63 international markets.

Endgame‘s lifetime haul now sits around $2.88 billion, roughly $39 million shy of Avatar‘s all-time record, and the Doomsday hype machine is clearly working as intended. None of this reflects badly on the movie Paramount actually made. David Ayer, coming off a productive run with The Beekeeper, directs Pitt as a retired Special Forces veteran crossing the Alaskan wilderness with his combat dog after a plane crash, and the reception suggests the pairing landed. The film holds 85% on Rotten Tomatoes with a consensus that reads:

“A rigorously entertaining adventure story told through a spartan script and memorable set pieces, Heart of the Beast pays rousing tribute to man’s best friend.”

By the normal rules of a September adult thriller, this was a solid launch. The problem is the budget. At $82 million, with a worldwide total that stood at only 0.7 times production cost after the first frame per The Numbers, the movie needs legs that the opening alone can’t promise.

A Rerun Can Out-Gross a Brand-New Star Vehicle

The silver lining is that nobody actually lost this weekend except maybe Universal’s Forgotten Island. Ticket sales were up 58.5% over the same frame last year, and the domestic box office is running 19% ahead of 2025 at $7.8 billion. There’s a reasonable argument that Encore grew the pie rather than stealing Pitt’s slice. The real test for Heart of the Beast arrives over the next few weeks, because A- CinemaScore films with older-skewing audiences tend to hold well, and Pitt’s F1 proved last year that his movies can play long.