The Friday Box Office For 05/30/25
‘Karate Kid: Legends’ and ‘Bring Her Back’ are both mild disappointments (but not remotely disasters) as ‘Lilo & Stitch’ and ‘Mission: Impossible 8’ hold well after their record-setting holiday debuts
The Friday box office news, including…
Karate Kid: Legends kicks below its weight class for a likely $20 million launch.
Lilo & Stitch and Mission: Impossible 8 both hold fine in their post-holiday frames.
The Phoenician Scheme will — of course —nab the year’s top per-theater average.
Bring Her Back is expected to struggle to reach $7 million in its domestic debut.
Final Destination 6, Sinners and Friendship continue to pull aspirational grosses.
And more…!
The good news for this post-Memorial Day weekend is that the overall marketplace is currently healthy enough for me to be able to “judge” the films in play on a case-by-case basis without worrying as to what their respective performance means for the entire theatrical ecosystem. One year ago today, the top movie of the weekend was Garfield with $14 million in its second Fri-Sun frame. The punditry ran out of ink decrying the death of theatrical just before Bad Boys: Ride or Die, and then Inside Out 2 kicked off what would be a four-month hot streak through until Joker: Folie à Deux’s underwhelming debut. Even that pearl-clutching October was mainly due to Joker 2 being presumed to be such an all-encompassing tentpole that the competition mostly took the month off.
Of course, the presidential election in early November (both in terms of cultural distraction and higher-than-normal advertising costs) didn’t help, so thank god for Art the Clown and Sienna Shaw (and, if we’re being honest, Amazon’s Red Notice in mid-November). Anyway, the bad news is that The Karate Kid: Legends underwhelmed on its opening day, while Bring Her Back didn’t exactly break out. However, A) neither film is going to be an actual “Whoops, we lost money!” commercial loser, and B) the holdovers are still holding strong. Well, that and Wes Anderson’s latest flick nabbed the year’s biggest per-theater average. I know, please try to contain your shock. But alas, with $270,000 on Friday, The Phoenician Scheme is set to “only” earn $570,000 in six theaters for a “sad-n-shameful” $95,000 per-theater-average.