Welcome to Week 20 of the Knock on Wood Movie Fantasy League dispatch. Every week (more or less), we’ll bring you a recap of the past weekend’s box office, alongside an overview of the new release films and an updated leaderboard, complete with full teams and points!
The domestic box office shows Spider-Man: Brand New Day is down 51% from last weekend, which might be a large drop for any film other than the year’s highest-grossing so far! That $70.7 million has pushed its total to nearly $800 million domestically and $2 billion worldwide, making it the fourth highest-grossing film of all time domestically and the eighth worldwide…and it won’t stop there. Whenever Spider-Man ends its run, it will be among the highest grossers in history. Not too bad for Tom Holland’s fourth outing as the web-slinger! The Odyssey remained at #2 with $23.6 million, while Toy Story 5, Minions & Monsters, and Moana continued their slow and steady decline down the charts.
The biggest new release of the weekend, and another big bet from Warner Bros. in a year full of swings and misses, is The End of Oak Street. The latest from It Follows director David Robert Mitchell, Oak Street is a survival sci-fi/horror thriller, a genre blend that could be downright spellbinding in the right filmmaker’s hands. Luckily, Mitchell has made the most of his time away from our screens and has revitalized the dinosaur sub-genre that the Jurassic franchise has driven into the ground over the last eleven years. It’s skillful popcorn fare and freakish creature horror hand-in-hand, an action spectacle with sharp teeth reminiscent of an especially mean Twilight Zone episode. It’s also a wonderfully cathartic family drama – not especially deep, but still resonant, and it’ll have you feeling things in the final act. For the sake of original cinema, I hope this is a hit, and though the reception has been fairly muted, it carved out a space at #3 on the box office charts with $21 million. Here’s hoping it follows in its genre cousins’ footsteps and sticks around for weeks to come.
The only other eligible new release is The Rivals of Amziah King, a neo-Western crime thriller that debuted at South by Southwest in early 2025. In its initial limited release this weekend (about 632 theaters), it landed at a respectable $1 million, which earned it the #15 spot on the domestic box office. A beekeeping revenge flick that doesn’t star Jason Statham? Say it ain’t so.
Also out this week is a fascinating slate of summer-ending counter-programming across a wide variety of genres, including PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie (which came in at a whopping $20 million domestic, just a hair below fellow dino feature Oak Street!), music documentary Katseye: Wild Hearts, Angel Studios historical drama The Brink of War, and a professionally-filmed presentation of Six: The Musical! Those new releases make up the majority of the Top Ten, but further down, you can find Nimrods – a coming-of-age comedy with a shot of Green Day flavoring – and The Wrong Girls, a stoner comedy featuring Kristen Stewart, Alia Shawkat, Seth Rogen, and Kumail Nanjiani.
This also seemed to be prime time for an anniversary re-release. This past weekend alone, you could go see 10th anniversary screenings of Train to Busan, Your Name, and La La Land (specifically in Dolby Cinemas), and a 25th-anniversary release of David Wain’s seminal comedy Wet Hot American Summer. I was fortunate enough to attend an afternoon showing of La La Land (one of my all-time favorite films), and it was utterly magical.
As it continues to expand to more theaters nationwide, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma nabbed the critical score crown this weekend, netting an additional 90 points through its near-universal acclaim. Check out our leaderboard here. For the most up-to-date scoring on each movie, check out this spreadsheet. Additionally, I’ve made a Letterboxd list of every film chosen by our players for the Fantasy League. You can view that anytime here. Congratulations to TylerH, the first player to pass 3000 points!
Next week, Jason Statham stages a Mutiny, a group of Gen X ladies goes on a Spa Weekend, and another horror franchise refuses to give up without a fight…it’s Insidious: Out of the Further. But let’s be honest…it’ll be a surprise if Spider-Man and The Odyssey aren’t still at the tippy top.
As a reminder, submissions for the MFL are now closed. Thank you all for playing, and I am very much looking forward to seeing the board change every which way over the next few months! Please let us know if you have any feedback, and don’t forget to come back here next week for a recap and the updated leaderboard!
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