Friday Box Office: 'Minecraft' Tops and 'Drop' Flops as Two Jesus Flicks Score Big
'The Amateur' nabbed a $6 million opening day as both 'King of Kings' and 'The Chosen: The Last Supper Part 3' earn good-to-great first-day grosses.
The top movie on Friday was, of course, Warner Bros. Discovery and Legendary’s A Minecraft Movie. Jared Hess’s fantastical kid-friendly comedy earned another $20.5 million on its eighth day of domestic release, dropping a reasonable 64% from its $58 million opening day and bringing its total to $220.9 million in North America. With the kids and their parents presumably paying up and showing up on the Saturday and Sunday matinee circuit, we can expect an $82 million (-50%) second-weekend gross for a $282 million ten-day total. That will already put it just over/under the domestic totals of (among last year’s biggies) Mufasa: The Lion King ($254 million), Twisters ($268 million), Dune Part Two ($283 million) and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ($294 million). Among video game-based movies, it’ll be the second biggest, even accounting for inflation, behind only Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie ($574 million).
With a $434.2 million global cume and thus a current 51/49 domestic/overseas split, the $150 million flick will have around $555 million globally by tomorrow night. That will make it the second biggest video game movie behind, again, Universal’s Passion of the Plumbers ($1.3 billion). Even “normal” legs from a $555 million “end of second weekend” global total get it to around $882 million worldwide. $1 billion is not the bar for success, especially with China no longer expected to regularly pitch in with already successful game-centric flicks like Rampage ($155 million out of $430 million) or Ready Player One ($220 million out of $575 million). However, it *could* still pass Star Wars ($460 million sans inflation but including 5,137 reissues), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever ($453 million) and Wicked Part One ($475 million) as the biggest domestic grosser to fall short of that respective, arbitrary milestone.
Disney’s Beauty and the Beast opened with $174 million in March of 2017 and earned $90 million (-48%) on weekend two before legging out to $504 million (1.58x its ten-day total) domestically. That would give the Jack Black/Jason Momoa flick a $445 million domestic finish. Comparing early April biggies, it’s holding up better than Universal’s Furious 7 (-60% from a $147 million debut in 2015) and Fate of the Furious (-61% from a $99 million debut in 2017). The Super Mario Bros. Movie dropped just 37% from its $146 million Fri-Sun debut (amid a $205 million Wed-Sun launch) and would earn 1.63x its $353 million *12-day* total. Even noting that most of the upcoming competition (Sinners, Accountant 2, Thunderbolts) are less kid-skewing, that -- to say nothing of Barbie (-37% from a $162 million debut and then 1.81x its $351 million ten-day total) -- seems overly aspirational.