Box Office: 'Madame Web' Bombs While Bob Marley Nabs Strong $7.5 Million Friday

The musical biopic will earn around $46 million by President's Day while Sony's latest doomed "not quite a Spider-Man movie" flick will open closer to $26 million

I wrote on Thursday that Bob Marley: One Love would likely end its six-day opening weekend with between $32 million (if it legged like The Color Purple) and $53 million (if it legged like Rent). Well, it looks like it will end up in the middle of those relative extremes. The $70 million Paramount release earned $7.4 million on Friday. That’s half of the record (for a non-Friday Valentine’s Day opener) $14 million notched on Wednesday but a 94% jump from its $3.8 million Thursday. As hoped/expected, the folks who wanted to see it showed up on Wednesday, while the less frenzied waited until the proper weekend. This is normal for non-Friday long-holiday openings, but after Color Purple nosedived after a $18 million Christmas Day launch, I was in firm “trust but verify” mode.  

With a likely Fri-Sun $25 million weekend and a Fri-Mon $28.5 million haul, the Reinaldo Marcus Green-directed drama, starring Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lashana Lynch, will earn a rousing $46.5 million in its full six-day holiday launch. That’s a spectacular win for Paramount’s marketing departments, as this could have easily been the kind of movie everyone says they want but then ignores upon theatrical release. Coming off the $30 million MLK launch of Mean Girls (a musical remake of the 2004 teen comedy), which was initially greenlit for Paramount+, they are 2/2 in terms of creating awareness and interest in old-school movie-movies. This leaves me overly optimistic for John Krasinski's Ryan Reynolds-starring If. The picture, about a young girl who can see everyone’s imaginary friends, opens on May 10 and is (by default) the year’s biggest wholly original theatrical. 

Live-action musicals have been relatively popular and bankable since Moulin Rouge in 2001. As regular readers are tired of hearing by now, it’s a genre that is declared dead yet tends to score when Hollywood releases a crowdpleaser like Wonka, The Greatest Showman or La La Land. Yes, I count musically focused biopics as A) the musicians in question qualify as marquee characters (relatively speaking, Freddy Mercury = Harry Potter) and B) part of the hook of showing up for Straight Outta Compton, Elvis, Bohemian Rhapsody or Bob Marley: One Love is to bask in the well-known and much-loved songs. I’m incredibly optimistic about Antoine Fuqua’s Michael (as in Michael Jackson), which opens on April 18, 2025, courtesy of Lionsgate (domestic) and Universal (overseas). It’ll undoubtedly earn more for Universal than the previously scheduled The Exorcist: Deceiver. 

It’s no surprise Paramount is trying to lure Ridley Scott to direct that long-in-development Bee-Gees biopic. Yes, folks have been making jokes about it being rated BG-13 since 2019. It does make me wonder if Daniel Radcliffe’s self-satirizing Weird Al Yankovic biopic might have been a theatrical hit (instead of a Roku original) in a less streaming-focused era.  I don’t pretend to know what went wrong with Universal’s self-directed Madonna biopic, but I’d try to fix it. Meanwhile, Paramount has macro-issues as a giant corporation, but their theatrical year is thus far looking more like 2022 than 2016. If’s opening day on May 17 is a long way off. Maybe they should fork over $80 million to buy Coyote vs. Acme and open it in early April to see if they can pull the competitive f*** you of the year. 

Madame Web (Dakota Johnson) and the three Spider-Women of Madame Web (Sydney Sweeney, Isabala Merced and Celeste O’Connor) were *not* marquee characters. The S.J. Clarkson-directed thriller, a YA-focused Terminator meets Dead Zone, earned $4.3 million on Friday following a $6 million Wednesday and $2.15 million Thursday. With miserable reviews and a C+ from CinemaScore, we can expect a $15.6 million Fri-Sun weekend, $18.5 million Fri-Mon frame and $26.7 million Wed-Mon six-day launch. Marvel and DC superhero movies are now as execution dependent as any other genre. And Madame Web, a poorly reviewed prequel to a prequel to an actual superhero movie that will never get made featuring characters most audiences had never heard of, was DOA. It’s the “superheroes and cinematic universes in the abstract” mistake many of Marvel’s rivals made in the 2010s. 

It stinks that the downturn of the Marvel/DC superhero genre has arrived amid a slew of comparatively inclusive titles. Meanwhile, the $80 million Madame Web partially suffered for the sins of Morbius. The Marvels paid for the failure of Ant-Man 3. Blue Beetle was kneecapped by the crimes of The Flash. Even Birds of Prey was a victim of Suicide Squad’s mediocrity. There’s a conversation to be had about how DC and (especially) Marvel put off genuine inclusivity until the very end of the 2010s when the superhero boom was almost over. Would (the genuinely good) Blue Beetle and (the admittedly lousy) Madame Web have performed better in the mid-2010s? Probably, but Madame Web was still a costume-free, action-lite, low-fi romp that felt more like a late ‘90s or early 2000s B-hero flick than a top-tier MCU or DC Films epic. 

This weekend is another example of how what Hollywood thinks will make money is often different than what will make money. Sony has been trying to launch this “Spider-Man universe without Spider-Man" thing for over ten years, to the point where (at least from a marketing point of view) they kneecapped a mostly standalone Amazing Spider-Man 2 to sell it as a Sinister Six prequel. After Morbius, Madame Web and (presumably) Kraven the Hunter, I think we can declare Venom the exception to the rule. The good news is that Sony isn’t looking at these films as the be-all/end-all of their corporation, as we somewhat saw in the mid-2010s. When you can make $175 million globally on Anyone But You, you don’t need Madame Web. It’s time for Sony’s “Spider-Man universe without Spider-Man" project to end. 

The only other newbie was the theatrical release of episodes 4-6 of the fourth season of The Chosen. The Fathom release earned $1.02 million on Friday following a $777,000 Thursday debut. We can expect a $3.52 million over the Fri-Sun frame for an overall $4.93 million Thurs-Mon launch. That’s below the $6.035 million Fri-Sun/$7.4 million Wed-Sun total for the first three episodes earlier this month or the $9.4 million Wed-Sun launch for Christmas with the Chosen in December of 2021. But it’s still “free money” for theaters and the distributors that treat these releases as glorified advertising campaigns for the show’s streaming launch. Next up for Angel Studios is Cabrini on March 1. That biopic, about Roman Catholic missionary and future Saint Francesca Cabrini (Cristiana Dell'Anna), is director Alejandro Gómez Monteverde’s follow-up to Sound of Freedom. 

Other than Lisa Frankenstein earning just $550,000 (-68%) for a likely $2.2 million Fri-Mon haul and $7.84 million 11-day cume, there’s not much holdover news. And what there is (like The Beekeeper crossing $60 million domestic, Migration passing $115 million domestic and Mean Girls topping $100 million global, can wait until tomorrow.  

1. Bob Marley: One Love (Paramount) $7.5 million (new) $25.4 million total 

2. Madame Web (Sony) $4.3 million (new) $12.5 million total 

3. Argylle (Universal) $1.13 million (-42%) $32.9 million total 

4. The Chosen s4 eps 4,5,6 (Fathom) $1.02 million (new) $1.8 million total 

5. Migration (Universal) $770,000 (+15%) $111.8 million total 

6. Wonka (Warner Bros. Discovery) $750,000 (-3%) $207.1 million total 

7. The Beekeeper (Amazon MGM) $713,000 (-26%) $57.3 million total 

8. The Land of Bad (Avenue) $680,000 (new) $680,000 total 

9. Anyone But You (Sony) $650,000 (-31%) $82.9 million total 

10. Lisa Frankenstein (Universal) $550,000 (-68%) $6.2 million total 

11. Mean Girls (Paramount) $273,000 (-52%) $70.2 million total 

12. American Fiction (Amazon MGM) $213,000 (-47%) $18.2 million total 

13. Poor Things (Searchlight) $204,000 (-42%) $31.13 million total