The anime title Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc is dominating its fellow new releases Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere and Regretting You during a weekend that is turning out far differently from expected.
The Chainsaw Man – The Movie release comes just a few months after the anime hit Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle became the highest-grossing Japanese movie of all time, earning $640 million worldwide.
Per Deadline, as of Saturday morning, Chainsaw Man is now projected to take No. 1 in a domestic box office upset with a 3-day total between $15.5 and $17 million. Previously, the horror sequel Black Phone 2 was expected to top the domestic box office during its sophomore weekend.
While Chainsaw Man has fallen significantly behind the record-shattering $70.6 million domestic debut of Demon Slayer, it is one of only nine anime movies to open above $10 million in North America, indicating that theaters may still be in the middle of a seismic shift in how theatrical anime releases perform outside of Japan.
Black Phone 2 has also fallen below one of the two other new releases in what is proving to be a heated box office battle.
While the music biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere was at one time projected to lead the pack of incoming titles, it is slipping to No. 4 with a projected $9 to $10 million debut, while Black Phone 2 is hitting No. 3 with $12 million.
The recent movie to which Deliver Me from Nowhere is most comparable is 2024’s Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. Both have roughly $50 million reported budgets, auteur directors at the helm (Scott Cooper for Deliver and James Mangold for Unknown), and rising A-list stars in the lead role (Jeremy Allen White as Sprinsteen, Timothée Chalamet as Dylan).
While A Complete Unknown turned out a solid, if not spectacular, worldwide total of $140.5 million, it had a superior opening weekend with a 3-day haul of $11.6 million. If Deliver Me from Nowhere hits the lower end of its range and continues its current trajectory, its overall worldwide total could be as low as $109 million.
Considering the fact that its reported $55 million budget could place its estimated break-even point somewhere around $137.5 million, this would see it falling short, though it could eventually make up its deficit on VOD, physical media, and streaming.
Meanwhile, the Colleen Hoover adaptation Regretting You is surging to No. 2 with a projected $13 million debut. While this is a significant drop from the debut of Hoover’s previous romance, It Ends with Us ($50 million), the fact that it is outperforming expectations and has earned a superb Rotten Tomatoes audience score of 90% could mean that it will have legs as its run continues.
Overall, in spite of the fact that there has been a dramatic shift from the original projections, this weekend sees the big titles of October 2025 continuing the month’s trend of lukewarm opening weekends.
The October new release with the biggest debut was Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, which had a $34.1 million haul that should have quite easily been outdone by one of the month’s big releases, which included Tron: Ares in addition to Black Phone 2, Regretting You, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, and Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc.
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