Wake Up Dead Man Breaks Knives Out Franchise's Box Office Streak With Disappointing Thanksgiving Run

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery has broken an important box office streak for the franchise. The new movie is the third installment in the whodunit series from writer-director Rian Johnson. Although 2025’s Wake Up Dead Man is a Netflix original that is set to debut on streaming on December 12, it began a limited theatrical release on November 26.

Per Deadline, as of Saturday morning, Wake Up Dead Man is projected to earn a 3-day total of $1.5 million and a 5-day total of $2.5 million at the domestic box office over Thanksgiving weekend. This total will see it debuting at No. 7 behind Eternity, The Running Man, Predator: Badlands, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, Wicked: For Good, and Zootopia 2.

This marks the first time that a Knives Out installment has debuted outside the domestic Top 5. While all three Rian Johnson movies debuted over Thanksgiving weekend, the original 2019 movie debuted at No. 2 with a 3-day of $26.8 million and a 5-day of $41.4 million.

Its 2022 sequel Glass Onion (which was also a Netflix original given a brief theatrical release) debuted at No. 3 with a 3-day of $9.4 million and a 5-day of $13.3 million.

While Wake Up Dead Man only played in 600 theaters, which is considerably fewer than Knives Out (3,461) or even Glass Onion (696), its per-screen average is also perilously low when compared to the previous installments. It is only projected to make $4,166 per theater over the 5-day holiday weekend, compared to Knives Out‘s $11,965 and Glass Onion‘s $19,080.

If Wake Up Dead Man had a per-screen average at Knives Out‘s level, it would have earned $7.2 million, debuting at No. 4 between Predator ($6.4 million) and Now You See Me ($10 million). Had it followed Glass Onion‘s lead, its $11.4 million haul would have landed it at No. 3, only below Wicked ($93.5 million) and Zootopia (~$155 million).

This disappointing theatrical haul does not mean that the movie will fail once it’s on Netflix. One reason it could thrive on streaming is the fact that critics’ rapturous Wake Up Dead Man reviews have earned it a Certified Fresh score of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is the second-best score of the franchise behind Knives Out (97%).

It is possible that, in the six years since the original and the three years since Glass Onion, audiences have grown accustomed to watching installments from the franchise at home rather than in theaters. This could have led to Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery behaving more like a typically underwhelming Netflix theatrical venture than its predecessors.

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