'Abigail' and 'Ungentlemanly Warfare' Both Disappoint In Box Office Bloodbath

As 'Civil War' held firm as the event movie of the moment, not even a Crunchyroll offering could avoid debuting to comparatively underwhelming numbers.

Before COVID-19, I didn’t care much about the cumulative box office. In a conventional marketplace, the overall gross would ebb and flow compared to prior weekends, seasons or years, depending on what was released at a given time. And amid a healthy theatrical ecosystem, if you wanted more than just mega-budget tentpoles opening every weekend, you had to understand that a March dominated by Alice in Wonderland would have a much larger overall gross than one led by Rango.

And if the summer of 2014 was in a “slump” compared to 2013, that was mainly because Furious 7, The Good Dinosaur and Fifty Shades of Grey were delayed to 2015. However, there isn’t a single rate-of-return flop in the entire top 23 of summer 2014 because the specific films (Guardians of the Galaxy, Lucy, The Fault in Our Stars, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Neighbors, etc.) more or less earned what they needed to on their own merits.

So if you tell me that the overall April box office is way down from 2023, I shrug and point to the absurd $575 million domestic gross of The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Last year’s Illumination-produced video game adaptation was the third-biggest April release ever behind the previous two Avengers films. But when you tell me that the individual movies opening this month aren’t exactly pulling their self-imposed weight, well, that’s a problem.