Box Office: 'Sonic 3' Tops $200M as 'Den of Thieves 2' Wins Weekend With $15.5M
'Mufasa: The Lion King' now sits at $540 million globally as 'Moana 2' nears $1 billion and 'Wicked' is about to pass 'Star Wars' (domestically) and $700 million (worldwide)
For those so inclined…
The overall domestic weekend total will be around $78 million. The one-to-one comparison with last year’s second weekend ($101 million) isn’t entirely fair since MLK weekend fell (as it often does) on frame 02 and not frame three. However, much of the $23 million differential might have been a matter of Companion being moved to January 31 instead of debuting this weekend. Ironically, the last (pre-COVID) time MLK weekend was celebrated on the third weekend of the year was in 2020. The second frame of 2020 pulled $117 million in total. What was the difference? Beyond Rise of Skywalker and Jumanji: The Next Level pulling just a touch more than Mufasa and Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Universal’s 1917 expanded wide with a $37 million domestic “debut.”
That was the last of a semi-regular run of big-deal war movies expanding wide to fortune and glory in early January. It followed Black Hawk Down in 2002, Zero Dark Thirty in 2013, Lone Survivor in 2014, and American Sniper (which massively overperformed with $350 million domestically and $547 million worldwide) in 2015, along with less successful efforts like 13 Hours in 2016, Patriot’s Day (if you want to count it) in 2017, and 12 Strong in 2018. Five years ago this weekend, Sam Mendes’ single-take World War I action thriller earned $383 million worldwide and was one of Hollywood’s last pre-COVID blockbusters. I hope the same Comcast executive who greenlit Dolittle and Cats also greenlit 1917, thereby saving their job.
That there’s no 1917 this weekend is an example of two key COVID-era deficiencies. First, you don’t have big war movies pulling B-sized tentpole grosses. I am… curious if Hollywood will react to the incoming Trump administration and a trend toward domestic-skewing tentpoles (overseas box office dropped last year more than North American revenue) with a revival of America-focused movies like Hacksaw Ridge and Lone Survivor. Second, there really aren’t any early-year Oscar expansions like Chicago, Slumdog Millionaire, American Hustle, or La La Land that can play in that sandbox anymore. Once upon a time, you had mainstream, commercially viable Oscar contenders like Hidden Figures, The Silver Linings Playbook and Million Dollar Baby, whose nationwide expansion boosted the first month of the new year.
Once upon a time, audiences would show up for non-franchise, adult-skewing *movie-movies* to the point where Black Swan could top $300 million worldwide and (ignoring the Oscar factor for a moment) a film like Se7en could almost outgross Batman Forever worldwide. The Oscar season had already declined in the late 2010s thanks to a migration to streaming. Cut to 2024, and everyone is popping champagne because Poor Things, which I’d argue is a pretty mainstream, crowdpleasing comic fantasy (a damn good one, mind you), topped $100 million worldwide. The problem with the Oscars and the Oscar season box office isn’t that the Academy stopped nominating “mainstream movies,” but instead that audiences stopped showing up to much of what used to be considered mainstream.
And now… the actual weekend box office, which is similar to yesterday’s report, hence the above four paragraphs of “new” pontificating for existing paid subscribers. You’ll (probably) get the “SnyderCut” of that — complete with Joe Morton narration for maximum emotional impact — for American Sniper’s tenth anniversary next week.