While Crunchyroll’s anime release One Piece Film: Red won a closely contested race at the Friday box office just by a hair, Warner Bros. and DC Films’ holdover superhero film Black Adam is expected to top the weekend by a considerable margin. The Dwayne Johnson-fronted action film has been dominating the box office for two weeks, and is looking to top $135 million domestically by Sunday.

That’s a so-so result for a film that is said to have cost upwards of $195 million to produce, minus marketing, and will face an existential threat in exactly one week with the arrival of Disney's hugely anticipated Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. While Black Adam made $4.7 million on its third Friday, it came in around $100,000 short of the Japanese import One Piece Film: Red -- the 15th feature in a legendary franchise that also includes a television series that began over two decades ago and has aired over 1,000 episodes.

The specialty release’s success (no doubt aided by premium pricing at large format venues) continues a hot streak for anime titles at the domestic box office, after the back-to-back hits Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero earlier this year, and Jujutsu Kaisen 0 in 2021. Both those movies admittedly opened to around twice as much as One Piece Film’s projected $10.3 million three-day debut, after a $4.8 million Friday (including $1.7 million from Thursday previews). The film is playing in Japanese with subtitles, and dubbed in English, in nearly 2,400 North American theaters. Black Adam is expected to hit $17 million in its third weekend.

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Claiming the third spot in its third weekend, Universal’s Ticket to Paradise clocked $2.5 million on Friday for an estimated $7 million weekend finish. Starring Julia Roberts and George Clooney as a warring divorced couple forced to reunite for their daughter’s sudden wedding, the romantic comedy is a bonafide hit with over $130 million globally and nearly $45 million stateside. Likewise, Paramount’s horror hit Smile maintained its hold on the fourth spot on its sixth Friday, with $1.1 million. The film’s running domestic total now stands at over $96 million, and a $100 million-plus finish is a foregone conclusion — a tremendous result for a smartly marketed scary movie that cost $17 million and will probably make more than $200 million globally once the dust settles.

It was curtains for Universal’s Halloween Ends, which slipped out of the top five with $400,000 on its fourth Friday, taking its running domestic total to over $62 million. The top five was instead rounded out by another horror release, last week's Prey for the Devil, which added $800,000 on its second Friday for an estimated $2.6 million sophomore weekend and a running domestic total of around $12 million.

Overall business was expectedly muted this weekend, as studios cleared the path for next week’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which is expected to deliver one of the best openings of the year. You can watch our interview with Wakanda Forever director Ryan Coogler here, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.