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‘Terrifier 3’ Slashes ‘Joker’ to Take No. 1 at the Box Office, Trump Film ‘The Apprentice’ Fizzles

This image released by Cineverse Entertainment shows David Howard Thornton in a scene from "Terrifier 3." (Jesse Korman/Cineverse Entertainment via AP)
This image released by Cineverse Entertainment shows David Howard Thornton in a scene from "Terrifier 3." (Jesse Korman/Cineverse Entertainment via AP)
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‘Terrifier 3’ Slashes ‘Joker’ to Take No. 1 at the Box Office, Trump Film ‘The Apprentice’ Fizzles

This image released by Cineverse Entertainment shows David Howard Thornton in a scene from "Terrifier 3." (Jesse Korman/Cineverse Entertainment via AP)
This image released by Cineverse Entertainment shows David Howard Thornton in a scene from "Terrifier 3." (Jesse Korman/Cineverse Entertainment via AP)

The choices on the movie marquee this weekend included Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker, a film about Donald Trump, a “Saturday Night Live” origin story and even Pharrell Williams as a Lego. In the end, all were trounced by an ax-wielding clown.

“Terrifier 3,” a gory, low-budget slasher from the small distributor Cineverse, topped the weekend box office with $18.3 million, according to estimates Sunday. The film, a sequel to 2022’s “Terrifier 2” ($15 million worldwide in ticket sales), brings back the murderous Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) and lets him loose, under the guise of Santa, at a Christmas party.

That “Terrifier 3” could notably overperform expectations and leapfrog both major studios and awards hopefuls was only possible due to the disaster of “Joker: Folie à Deux.” After Todd Phillips’ “Joker” sequel, starring Phoenix and Lady Gaga, got off to a much-diminished start last weekend (and a “D” CinemaScore from audiences), the Warner Bros. release fell a staggering 81% in its second weekend, bringing in just $7.1 million.

For a superhero film, such a drop has little precedent. Disappointments like “The Marvels,” “The Flash” and “Shazam Fury of the Gods” all managed better second weekends. Such a mass rejection by audiences and critics is particularly unusual for a follow-up to a massive hit like 2019’s “Joker.” That film, also from Phillips and Phoenix, grossed more than $1 billion worldwide against a $60 million budget.

The sequel was pricier, costing about $200 million to make. That means “Joker: Folie à Deux” is headed for certain box-office disaster. Globally, it’s collected $165.3 million in ticket sales.

“This is an outlier of a weekend if ever there was one,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore. “If you had asked anyone a month ago or even a week ago: Would ‘Terrifier 3’ be the number one movie amongst all these major-studio films and awards contenders? To have a movie like this come along just shows you that the audience is the ultimate arbiter of what wins at the box office.”

The “Joker” slide allowed “The Wild Robot,” the acclaimed Universal Pictures and DreamWorks animated movie, to take second place in its third weekend with $13.4 million. Strong reviews for Chris Sanders’ adaptation of Peter Brown’s book have led the movie, with Lupita Nyong’o voicing the robot protagonist, to $83.7 million domestically and $148 million worldwide.

The young Donald Trump film “The Apprentice,” distributed by Briarcliff Entertainment in 1,740 theaters, opened in a distant 10th place, managing a paltry $1.6 million in ticket sales. While expectations weren’t much higher, audiences still showed little enthusiasm for an election-year origin story of the Republican nominee.

If headlines translated to ticket sales, Ali Abbasi’s film might have done better. “The Apprentice,” starring Sebastian Stan as Trump under the mentorship of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), has been making news since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival, up to its last-minute release just weeks before the election. The Trump campaign has called the movie “election interference by Hollywood elites.”

Abbasi’s film, set in the 1970s and 1980s, tested moviegoer’s appetite for a political film in an election year. Major studios and specialty labels passed on acquiring it in part because of the question of whether a movie about Trump would turn off both liberal and conservative moviegoers, alike. “The Apprentice” will depend on continued awards conversation for Strong and Stan to make a significant mark in theaters before voters turn out at the polls.

Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night” failed to ignite its nationwide expansion. The film, with an ensemble cast led by Gabriel LaBelle’s Lorne Michaels, collected $3.4 million from 2,288 locations. The Sony Pictures release, about the backstage drama as the NBC sketch comedy show is about to air for the first time in 1975, will likely need to make more of an impact with audiences to carry it through awards season.

“Piece by Piece,” a Pharrell Williams documentary-biopic hybrid animated in Lego form, had also been hoping to click better with moviegoers. The acclaimed Focus Features release, directed by veteran documentarian Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom,” “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”), opened with $3.8 million from 1,865 theaters.

But the debut for “Piece By Piece,” while low for a Lego animated movie, was very high for a documentary. “Piece By Piece,” which had the weekend’s best CinemaScore, an “A” from audiences, could play well for weeks to come. The film, which was modestly budgeted at $16 million, is also likely to end up the year’s highest grossing doc — if “Piece By Piece” can be called that.

“We Live in Time,” the weepy drama starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, had one of the year’s best per-theater averages in its five-screen opening. The A24 release, which will expand nationwide next weekend, debuted with $255,911 and a $51,000 per-screen average.

Outside of the success of Warner Bros.’ “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (which pulled in $7.1 million in its six weekends of release despite recently launching on video-on-demand), Hollywood’s fall has struggled to get going. Low-budget horror, like “Terrifier 3,” continues to be one good bet in theaters, but this autumn has been mostly characterized by bombs like “Joker: Folie à Deux” and “Megalopolis.”

This time last year, Taylor Swift was giving the box office a massive lift with “The Eras Tour.” This weekend compared with the same time last year was down 45% according to Comscore.

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Riley Keough Felt a Duty to Finish Lisa Marie Presley’s Book on Elvis, Grief, Addiction and Love

Riley Keough, left, and her mother Lisa Marie Presley arrive at the 24th annual ELLE Women in Hollywood Awards on Oct. 16, 2017, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)
Riley Keough, left, and her mother Lisa Marie Presley arrive at the 24th annual ELLE Women in Hollywood Awards on Oct. 16, 2017, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)
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Riley Keough Felt a Duty to Finish Lisa Marie Presley’s Book on Elvis, Grief, Addiction and Love

Riley Keough, left, and her mother Lisa Marie Presley arrive at the 24th annual ELLE Women in Hollywood Awards on Oct. 16, 2017, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)
Riley Keough, left, and her mother Lisa Marie Presley arrive at the 24th annual ELLE Women in Hollywood Awards on Oct. 16, 2017, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

Riley Keough was quick to agree to help complete her mother’s memoir. She thought they’d write it together, reflecting on her extraordinary upbringing and life, but it became a much greater responsibility after Lisa Marie Presley's sudden death in 2023.

Finishing the task her mother — the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley and a recording artist in her own right — had started years earlier elicited "all kinds of emotions," Keough said in an interview with The Associated Press ahead of the book’s release Tuesday.

"It just felt like a kind of a duty that I had to complete for her," Keough said. "I’m just happy that it’s done and that it’ll be in the world and there for people to read."

"From Here to the Great Unknown" is named in a nod to the moving lyrics of Presley’s "Where No One Stands Alone," a song Lisa Marie recorded as a duet with her father over 50 years after he first released it and over 40 years after his death.

The book touches on themes of "love and loss and grief and mothers and daughters and addiction," Keough said, adding it was conceived as a way for Lisa Marie to tell her story in her own words and connect with others.

Much of the book is indeed in Lisa Marie’s words, as Keough faithfully listened to recordings of her mother recounting memories and experiences both big and small. Lisa Marie wrote openly about the day her father died, her relationship with her mother, her marriage to Michael Jackson, her struggles with addiction and her son Benjamin’s death in 2020, among many other parts of her life.

Although Lisa Marie's life had been tabloid fodder since days after her birth, her memoir details intimate moments at Graceland, including how she feared for Presley's health as a young girl. In the chapter titled "He's Gone," she wrote that as a child, she often worried about her father dying and even wrote a poem with the line "I hope my daddy doesn't die."

She also wrote that Graceland became a "free-for-all" the day of Presley's death in 1977, with those at the house taking jewelry and personal items "before he was even pronounced dead."

Lisa Marie's frank writing extends into the section focused on her headline-making marriage to Jackson from 1994 to 1996. She wrote that Jackson confessed his love for her while she was still married to Keough, and that him wanting to have children with her, along with his increasing reliance on prescription medications, is what fractured their relationship.

Keough said hearing her mother’s voice in the recordings was at times "heartbreaking," but she enjoyed listening to happy memories, like how her parents met and fell in love. Keough is one of two children Lisa Marie had with her first husband, musician Danny Keough, along with their late son Benjamin.

"It makes me want to tell everyone to talk to their parents and record them telling all the stories about how they met and all these things because it’s just very cool to have," she said.

Keough’s role was to fill in parts of Lisa Marie’s story that she hadn’t gotten to before her death in January 2023 from a small bowel obstruction caused by bariatric surgery she had years prior. Some of those gaps included lighter moments and happy memories from her mother’s adult life.

"Until my mom’s addiction, really, which was when I was 25, I think we would all say that we had a really beautiful and exceptionally lucky and wonderful life," Keough said. "I wouldn’t define our lives, collectively, as a tragedy. I think that there is so much more."

And while those funnier, lighthearted moments, like Lisa Marie zipping through Graceland on her golf cart and Keough playing hooky from school to hang out with her mother, are detailed throughout the book, Keough said Lisa Marie wanted to write about grief and about the loss of her son.

Writing about her experience grieving her brother and detailing his death by suicide "wasn’t something that came super naturally" to Keough, but she said she knew her mother wouldn’t have shied away from it. Lisa Marie wrote that she wanted to honor her son by sparking frank conversations about suicide, addiction and mental health.

"How do I heal?" Lisa Marie writes in the book. "By helping people."

For Keough, much of her life now has revolved around learning to live with grief and cope with the monumental losses she’s faced.

"My last four years have just been grief, like so much grief. But it’s just something that I walk around with. You just have a broken heart, and that’s just the way it is, and you just learn to live with these holes and the sadness and the pain and the love and the yearning and the missing and the confusion and all of it," Keough said. "It’s very complicated. I think that you just have to try and allow it to be there."

While being the daughter of the King of Rock & Roll and much of Lisa Marie's life consisted of singular experiences, but Keough said all her mother wanted through her memoir to "connect with people on a human level.

"Her goal was to tell her story so that people could relate and feel less alone in the world, which is why I think we tell stories," Keough said. "So, that’s my goal."