Box Office: 'Mean Girls' Tops Friday With $12M, Statham's 'Beekeeper' Stings With $7M

Jason Statham scored a personal best for a solo, R-rated action movie, while 'Godzilla Minus One' just became the biggest Japanese movie ever in North America

Mean Girls cemented itself as the first “big” hit of the new year. The uh... feature adaptation of the musical stage show adaptation of the original theatrical feature film (that’s a sub-genre unto itself) earned $11.65 million on Friday, including $3.25 million in mid-week (Wednesday and Thursday) previews. That sets the stage for a Fri-Sun $28 million gross and an MLK weekend holiday debut of $32 million. Not bad for a $35 million film that was produced and intended for Paramount+ before smarter heads prevailed.  

I’ll be the first to smirk at Brian Robbins getting fortune and glory from a slew of movies (Sonic the Hedgehog 2, The Lost City, Scream, Top Gun: Maverick, etc.) greenlit by his predecessor (Jim Gianopulos), which to be fair is how the business works. See also Mark Canton getting canned at Sony partially due to the failure of The Cable Guy in 1996, only to watch his summer 1997 slate of My Best Friend’s Wedding, Men in Black, and Air Force One become mega-successful. However, Robbins was among those at the forefront of the whole “put this promising streaming flick into theaters instead” movement (Smile, 80 For Brady, etc.) before it was cool. 

Anyway, Mean Girls is a successful and shrewd example of multi-generational nostalgia. Yes, it’s obviously playing off the 20-year fandom of the Mark Waters-directed and Tina Fey-penned 2004 original teen comedy. However, it’s also playing off the newer and presumably younger-skewing fandom of the Broadway musical adaptation itself, which has “only” been around since 2017. Yes, it’s very sad that Hollywood has gone from the industry that would make an of-the-moment, youth-skewing, original teen comedy like Mean Girls to the place that would make a slightly updated musical remake of Mean Girls, but that’s not a new problem and I at least partially blame the audience.  

In a skewed way, Mean Girls is representative of our current era. It’s a straight-up IP cash-in for which we now must be thankful. That’s because it made it into theaters considering its streaming roots. And we must champion its success despite not exactly being a bold, original, non-franchise flick because theaters need every hit they can get now. I’ve often joked that we’ll know theatrical is truly healthy again when I can again be happy when terrible, misguided movies like Exodus: Gods and Kingdoms bomb at the box office, or when I don’t have to be thrilled that a movie I despised like Yesterday becomes a hit just because it’s an original, adult-skewing, high-concept non-franchise films. 

The film plays like a stereotypical live-action remake of a Walt Disney animated film. It’s entirely dependent on your awareness and fondness of the original. Its edge is sanded down to the point of wholesomeness in fear of offending the perpetually online thought police to the point of neutering its key conflicts. And, outside of the ambitious musical numbers, it often feels less like a movie than a feature-length cosplay. To be fair, Auliʻi Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey are in a much better, more authentic film while Reneé Rapp has killer pipes. However, in January of 2024, I will root for and cheer for the success of Mean Girls just as I will eventually hope for the success of... sigh... Beetlejuice 2... because what choice do I have? 

Meanwhile, Amazon MGM unleashed David Ayer’s The Beekeeper yesterday, with promising results. The Jason Statham-starring original actioner, again featuring the action star as a guy who is more than a Mechanic and more than a Transporter but is also a one-man-army/killing machine, earned $6.7 million on Friday. That’s a record (sans inflation) single-day gross for a solo Statham actioner, just above the $5.6 million Friday and $5.8 million Saturday of Transporter 2 back in 2005. He’s been doing this for well over 20 years, and most of his films of this nature (obviously not counting ensemble actioners, Fast Saga sequels or Meg flicks) are thrilled to open with $10 million and make it to $30 million domestic.  

The Beekeeper should earn around $16 million over the Fri-Sun portion of an $18 million Fri-Mon weekend. That’s below the $20 million Fri-Mon opening of The Transporter 2 over its Labor Day launch. However, it’s more than (for example) the entire $17 million domestic cume of Safe, which is my pick for Statham’s very best solo actioner.

The Beekeeper is somewhere in the middle, with its share of goofy plotting and refreshingly timely “young tech bros are the bad guys” plotting. I appreciated that they used expected bad guy Jeremy Irons instead as an exasperated old guy annoyed at how these dumb kids (personified by Josh Hutcherson) keep screwing up and attracting the wrong kind of attention. It spends too much time with folks explaining that Beekeepers are really bad news for bad guys, and it offers a fascinating eventual conflict (even if it’s a bit... politically dog whistle-y) that it doesn’t bother to unpack.  

But my son loved his first Statham actioner and wants a sequel (I tried to explain that Statham’s been making movies like this for two decades), and the third act really kicks the movie’s action and production value into gear. As for the success, including a solid 67% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s partially because the audience that grew up with The Transporter, Crank and War are now many of the “adults in the room” in terms of modern film criticism.  

Also, Statham doesn’t make movies like this as much as he used to, with Mechanic: Resurrection in 2016 being his first solo outing since (the also quite good) Homefront in late 2013 and then Wrath of Man being “next” in May of 2021. In between Homefront and Wrath of Man were a slew of higher-profile films like Furious 7, Spy and The Meg. Those mainstream crowdpleasers arguably introduced the action star to a broader audience. Statham never really got his “ticket to the A-list" action spectacular like Under Siege or Total Recall, but he clearly didn’t need it.  

Sony released The Book of Clarence on Friday as well, and it’s sadly playing like a “movie we say we want but ignore when we get it” theatrical offering. The biblical dramedy, starring LaKeith Stanfield as a down-on-his-luck grifter trying to sell himself as a messiah right alongside Jesus, comes courtesy of writer/director Jeymes Samuel. Samuel’s star-studded western The Harder They Fall is my pick for Netflix’s very best original studio programmer/genre flick, and it’s very encouraging to see Samuel make the jump from streaming originals to big-studio theatrical features.  

This $40 million flick plays a similar trick as the western, offering a genre usually represented by white folks and filling the screen with Black actors while A) using the demographic difference for storytelling nuance and B) having a grand old, unapologetically pulpy time with it. Honestly, Samuel’s current vibe of “super-duper important representational milestone... but also a grand old time at the movies that don’t put importance over showmanship” makes him one of the more promising “new” filmmakers around.  

Despite solid reviews, the $40 million production earned just $1 million on Friday, pointing toward a $2.6 million Fri-Sun/$3.2 million Fri-Mon debut. Look, I’ve been whining about this at least since Drew Barrymore’s Whip It bombed in late 2009, and it’s only gotten worse as general/casual audiences shifted some of their non-event moviegoing to streaming over theaters. At least, since it’s a Sony flick, it’ll eventually become momentarily popular on Netflix, and the perpetually online will claim that nobody told them that this movie even existed. All I’ll say is that if you have the time, it looks really good on a very big screen. 

Walt Disney released Soul into theaters yesterday, as kind of a “sorry we shunted your Pixar masterpiece to Disney+ in a short-sighted attempt to please Wall Street” mea culpa. They’ll do likewise with Turning Red on February 9 and Luca on March 22, which at least will give family audiences something “new” to see in theaters between Migration and Kung Fu Panda 4 in mid-March. The Jamie Foxx/Tina Fey toon, which justly won Best Animated Feature in 2021, earned $125,000 in 1,350 theaters for a likely $550,000 Fri-Mon weekend. And yes, I will absolutely check it out in theaters as I always regretted not being able to at the time, but I’m just waiting to see if my indecisive children want to tag along.  

In quick holdover news, Wonka will earn around $10 million over the long weekend for a $178 million domestic cume, while Sony’s leggy rom-com Anyone But You will drop just 24% over the Fri-Sun frame for a $7.42 million Fri-Sun/$8.95 million Fri-Mon weekend. It’ll have $57.2 million domestically by Monday night. Illumination’s Migration will earn $6.84 million over the Fri-Mon weekend for a new $86.4 million cume as it makes a play for $100 million domestic. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom will earn $5.93 million over the holiday weekend for a $109 million domestic total. Hey, at least it earned more in North America than The Flash and Dune. Blumhouse’s Night Swim understandably drowned in weekend two, earning $4 million (-66%) over the Fri-Sun frame and $4.7 million over the holiday for a $19.2 million 11-day total.  

Oh, and Godzilla Minus One just passed $50 million domestically as The Boy and the Heron tops $40 million. The former just passed Demon Slayer The Movie to become the biggest Japanese earner ever in North America and the fifth-biggest non-English grosser ever in unadjusted domestic box office.

In expansion news, MGM Amazon’s American Fiction expanded to 511 theaters over the weekend, where it will earn $1.84 million (+86%) over the Fri-Sun portion of a $2.32 million Fri-Mon weekend. That’s an okay $3,708 per-theater average and $5.635 million domestic cume. However, hope springs eternal and this Cord Jefferson-directed and Jeffrey Wright-starring comedy should absolutely end up in the thick of the Oscar race. Whether that moves the needle among moviegoers remains to be seen, but A) it’s one of the best films of the year and B) it’s a fully mainstream family comedy/pop culture satire.  

In other “spectacular mainstream comedy amid the Oscar race” news, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things will earn $2.05 million over the holiday for a $17.6 million cume. Again, fingers crossed that awards glory for the Emma Stone-starring sci-fi comedy will lead to leggy theatrical business. The Color Purple is pretty much done, give or take an actual Best Picture nomination when the time comes, as it’ll earn $2 million over the holiday for a $57 million domestic cume. That’s not great on a $100 million budget, but A) it too will be momentarily huge on Netflix in several months’ time and its high-level prestige makes it that much more valuable as a third-party license title and B) the raw gross shows that live-action musicals are doing just fine, thank you much.