Box Office: 'Wolf Man' Tops Friday With Mere $4.5M as 'Wicked' Passes 'Star Wars' (And $700M Worldwide)
Sony's straight-up comedy 'One of Them Days' is overperforming and might pass $15 million over the MLK holiday. Even so, 'Mufasa' is still expected to top with $17 million.
It was a very mixed-emotion Friday at the box office. On the one hand, the overall total is miserable, with the whole Fri-Mon weekend likely being topped by a month-old pre-Christmas holdover flick. And no, that’s not because Mufasa: The Lion King ($2.5 million for Friday and around $17 million for the Fri-Mon weekend) is pulling Avatar or Star Wars-level grosses. Sure, The Way of Water topped this holiday frame in 2022, but that was with a near-$40 million fifth weekend, and the $21 million second weekend of M3GAN placed second. Even last year had an MLK weekend topped by the $33 million launch of Mean Girls and a $19 million debut for Jason Statham’s The Beekeeper. Inflation aside, this will be the lowest-grossing MLK weekend since 2006, when Glory Road, Hoodwinked, and Last Holiday topped with $15-$17 million Fri-Mon grosses.
All three of those 2006 chart-toppers—an inspirational underdog sports drama, a non-Disney/non-Universal animated comedy, and a star-driven high-concept rom-com—are precisely the kind of films that barely get made at the theatrical level. That’s part of the problem, as the theatrical marketplace is now mainly at the mercy of would-be tentpoles and periodic non-tentpoles (usually a horror film) that can break out. So, it’s excellent news that Sony’s One of Them Days is pulling in grosses on par with a small-scale studio programmer from that bygone era. Lawrence Lamont’s directorial debut, penned by Syreeta Singleton in her feature screenwriting debut, the Keke Palmer/SZA comic caper earned $4.4 million on Friday for what looks like a $12 million Fri-Sun/$15 million Fri-Mon MLK weekend debut. Akeeleh and the Bee hive, rise up. That’s no queen’s ransom, but it’s how a smaller-scale comedy was once expected to perform.