GTA VI arrives into a thin November box office, one day before The New Hunger Games

Sensor Tower estimates the game had drawn 6.45 million digital pre-orders worth about $630 million as of Oct. 20, excluding physical copies. That pre-launch figure alone tops the roughly $625 million domestic run of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, the year's second-highest-grossing film behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and is more than 11 times what every movie in North American theatres grossed over Halloween weekend.

Grand Theft Auto VI arrives 13 years after Grand Theft Auto V. Rockstar confirmed development in February 2022; that September a hack leaked roughly 90 clips of early footage, and in December 2023 the first trailer leaked hours before its scheduled debut. The previous game generated $800 million in sales in its first 24 hours in 2013 and passed $1 billion in three days, which publisher Take-Two Interactive called the fastest any entertainment property had reached that mark. It has since sold more than 230 million units, according to Take-Two's August 2026 earnings report.

Take-Two reported $6.66 billion in revenue in its fiscal year ended in March and forecasts $8 billion to $8.2 billion in net bookings this fiscal year, a range the launch underpins.

On the film side, A24's You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, took $11.4 million in its third weekend, narrowly edging DC Studios' Clayface, according to Monday's final figures reported by Variety. It had finished second in each of its first two weekends, behind Street Fighter and then Clayface. Its domestic total now stands at $64.7 million, and it is the first documentary outside the concert genre to top the box office since Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004. Overall ticket sales came to about $56 million, down more than 40 percent from the prior weekend and the second-lowest total of the year, according to studio estimates.

Fortune attributes the quiet to the calendar: unlike Christmas, Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July, Halloween does not lift the box office when it falls on a weekend, because people get no extra day off and are more likely to spend peak moviegoing hours trick-or-treating or at parties.

The month's biggest scheduled swing is Sunrise on the Reaping on Nov. 20, the sixth film in the franchise and an adaptation of Suzanne Collins's 2025 bestseller. Boxoffice Pro's long-range tracking puts its opening at $55 million to $65 million; the last instalment, 2023's The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, opened to $44.6 million. Warner Bros.' animated The Cat in the Hat and Searchlight's Wild Horse Nine open Nov. 6, and Thanksgiving week brings Disney's animated Hexed and Universal's Focker In-Law on Nov. 25. Fortune notes Focker In-Law is the greater gamble: the fourth film in the series that began with 2000's Meet the Parents arrives 16 years after Little Fockers, which opened to $30.8 million in 2010.

Video games may draw a narrower audience than theatrical films, but Fortune concludes that a release of this size is bound to occupy the attention of millions and is likely to pull some of them away from the big screen for at least a weekend.