Denzel Washington’s ‘Little Things’ Tops Box Office With $4.8M Debut Weekend

The Little Things is a commercially-inclined Denzel Washington thriller that essentially opened like a “one for me” Denzel Washington drama.

In a flashback to happier times, the Fall of 2014 saw two of our biggest “righteous avenger man” action stars, Liam Neeson and Denzel Washington, going almost head-to-head. Neeson’s grim, somber and somewhat grotesque A Walk Among the Tombstones was not a gee-whiz crowdpleaser along the likes of Taken or Non-Stop. Based upon Lawrence Brock’s 1992 novel, the grim detective melodrama opened with $14 million, well below the $30 million debut of Non-Stop (and, obviously, the $49 million launch of Taken 2) and began a period where most of Neeson’s potboilers would open with between $11 million and $14 million. Digression, but post-Covid, Honest Thief and The Marksman have earned/will earn around $14 million total.

Meanwhile, a week later, Denzel Washington roared onto the scene with The Equalizer, a violent but popcorn-y action thriller loosely based on a popular mid-80’s CBS television show. Antoine Fuqua’s actioner, starring Washington as a retired marine/former DIA agent who wreaks righteous vengeance for those who couldn’t stand up for themselves, opened with $34.1 million and legged out to $103 million domestic and $192 million worldwide on a $73 million budget. We got The Equalizer 2 in summer 2018, which was Washington’s first-ever sequel and thus made The Equalizer his first-ever franchise. The film opened with $36 million and grossed $102 million domestic and $192 million worldwide on a $62 million budget.

While Queen Latifah is currently about to headline a TV remake of The Equalizer, with the pilot premiering after the Super Bowl, The Equalizer movies are so based upon Washington’s “righteous revenger man” persona that I wouldn’t be surprised if both versions end up co-existing. The reason I bring up this bit of box office history is that, by grim 2021 standards, we had a repeat of the Neeson v Washington showdown this past month. For two weeks, The Marksman had topped the box office, opening with $3.7 million and earning $2.1 million in weekend two. This week, Washington’s The Little Things topped the box office with, uh, $4.8 million in its debut domestic frame.

The irony of this, beyond the depressing raw grosses, is that The Marksman is closer in tone to a conventional Liam Neeson action thriller (it’s a PG-13 caper about a retired marine shielding a border-crossing youngster from a vicious Mexican cartel) while John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things is a relentlessly grim and action-lite murder mystery/passion play. It’s a reversal in terms of presumed commercial bankability, but the result is the same. The Little Things, co-starring Rami Malek (as a young and idealistic LA homicide detective) and Jared Leto (as a prime suspect in a series of serial murders), scored, by default, the biggest R-rated debut since the start of the Coronavirus pandemic.

The film is the second Warner Bros. theatrical release, following Wonder Woman 1984, to open in theaters worldwide and on HBO Max concurrently with the first 30 days of domestic theatrical release. We won’t know the streaming viewership for a month (Warner is claiming that it’s already tops at HBO Max), but even with Washington’s all-too-rare drawing power this one never would have been a breakout theatrical hit. First, it’s maybe Washington’s worst commercial star vehicle ever. It makes Washington’s underappreciated supernatural mystery Fallen ($25 million total in 1998) look like a thrill-a-minute action spectacular. Circumstances notwithstanding, The Little Things is essentially a Denzel Washington thriller that opened like a “one for me” Denzel Washington drama.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. debuted with $4.4 million over a $6 million Thanksgiving weekend back in 2017, while Antwone Fisher opened wide with $3.8 million in 1,001 theaters in January of 2002. By the way, those are two of Washington’s best “underseen” or “underrated” flicks, so if you want to watch a *good* Washington flick, there you go. Inflation aside, The Great Debaters (Washington’s second directorial effort after Antwone Fisher) opened with $6 million over Christmas 2006. Of course, none of those were outright hits, and it’s hard to argue that The Little Things is/will be a theatrical success. How it performs on HBO Max may be another situation entirely.

The Little Things is the kind of movie for which moviegoers wait until VOD/DVD or catch down the line on a streaming platform. The catch is that if you subscribe to HBO Max ($14.99 per month), you don’t have to wait. Much of WB’s 2021 slate is comprised of films which would have been commercial question marks in ideal theatrical times. Save for Wonder Woman 1984 and (arguably) The Matrix Resurrections, most of WB’s 2021 slate (Tom and Jerry, The Many Saints of Newark, King Richard, Godzilla Vs. Kong, Dune, The Suicide Squad, etc.) are films that might have struggled theatrically for one reason (a disappointing predecessor, a lack of theatrical interest, etc.) or another.

If, Judas and the Black Messiah excepted, the next few WB/HBO Max releases aren’t well-received, then we may have to argue it was a quality issue too. Regardless, The Little Things is exactly the kind of old-school, star-driven, adult-skewing studio programmer that everyone says Hollywood never makes, everyone ignores when they open in theaters and then everyone catches years later on Netflix. Washington’s drawing power notwithstanding, The Little Things, had it been released under normal circumstances and in normal times, likely would have been just another “what we say we want from Hollywood” Warner Bros. release that nobody sees. See also: The Way Back, Blinded By the Light, The Good Liar, The Kitchen, Motherless Brooklyn and The Goldfinch.

Coupled with poor reviews and little pre-release buzz, The Little Things arguably earned maybe half of what it otherwise would have this weekend even in the best of times. That it was about as unengaging as The Snowman (which opened with $3.3 million for a $6 million finish in 2017) certainly doesn’t help its theatrical fortunes. Of course, as I wrote back then, most of the hit serial killer flicks over the last 30 years (save for Se7en) were either female-led (Silence of the Lambs, The Cell, Copycat) or were male/female two-handers (Hannibal, Kiss the Girls, The Bone Collector, Sea of Love, Basic Instinct, Along Came a Spider, etc.). Your move, The Batman.