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UPDATED, 12:50 PM: Ishana Night Shyamalan’s debut film is on the move, again. And the new date is a familiar one. Two months after Warner Bros. shuffled The Watchers back by a week to the June 14-16 Fathers Day frame, the pic is headed back to its original June 7 date.
It’ll have some action-packed company that Friday, going against Sony’s Bad Boys: Ride or Die, the long-gestating fourth film in the nearly 30-year-old franchise. Lionsgate’s The Crow remake also was set for June 7, but that pic flew away from the date about three weeks ago and now is set for August 23.
Warners Bros. is hoping to cater to a female audience with The Watchers.
Also opening wide on June 7 is Vertical Entertainment’s The Exorcism directed by Joshua John Miller.
PREVIOUSLY, February 28: Moving away from the crowded June 7 weekend which now has Sony’s Bad Boys 4 and Lionsgate’s The Crow, New Line‘s Ishana Night Shyamalan horror movie The Watchers is going a week later on Fathers Day weekend, June 14 which is where Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out 2 resides.
It’s OK, an adult film and a Pixar movie can completely co-exist on the same weekend.
The feature directorial debut of M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter sparked a bidding war, resulting in New Line snapping it up. The pic is based on the 2021 gothic horror novel by A.M. Shine and follows Mina (Dakota Fanning), a 28-year-old artist who gets stranded in an expansive, untouched forest in western Ireland. When Mina finds shelter, she unknowingly becomes trapped alongside three strangers that are watched and stalked by mysterious creatures each night.
Pic also stars Georgina Campbell (Barbarian), Oliver Finnegan (Creeped Out) and Olwen Fouere (The Northman). M. Night Shyamalan produces with Ashwin Rajan and Nimitt Mankad. The executive producers are Jo Homewood and Stephen Dembitzer.
Meanwhile, that first weekend of June is a hot frame. It use to be years ago that major studios would sidestep the post-Memorial Day frame. However, the first weekend of June hit a record opening high last year with Sony/Marvel’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse seeing a 3-day debut of $120.7M.
Other big openers during the first weekend of June include 2017’s Wonder Woman ($103.2M) and 2004’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban ($93.6M).
Disney/Pixar’s The Incredibles 2 at $182.6M from 2018 continues to own the biggest domestic box office opening over Father’s Day weekend.