Box Office Milestones: 'Bad Boys 4' Passes $400M as 'It Ends With Us' Tops $200M

Sony's comparatively 'Moneyball'-ish summer featured the film that rebooted the season and the one that cemented its stronger-than-expected success.

Since Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s Bad Boys Ride: or Die opened with a robust $56 million, we’ve seen nearly uninterrupted franchise offerings that have performed either as well as hoped (A Quiet Place: Day One, Alien: Romulus, etc.) or even better than optimistically projected (Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine). It is… surmised that the June-August successes will lead to a post-Labor Day season dominated by Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Joker: Folie a Deux and Venom: The Last Dance. Then, the industry aims for a robust Thanksgiving-to-Christmas slate ruled by Gladiator 2, Wicked Part One, Moana 2, Mufasa: The Lion King and Sonic the Hedgehog 3. To paraphrase Watchmen, that potentially *permanent* theatrical recovery? It started 77 days ago.

So it’s worth noting that Bad Boys 4 has passed $400 million worldwide, including $196 million ( a rousing 3.5x multiplier) in North America, on a $100 million budget. That’s not far from Bad Boys For Life ($206 million domestically and $430 million globally) in early 2020. Concurrently, Sony and Wayfarer Studios’ It Ends With Us has passed $200 million worldwide on a mere $25 million budget. That makes it the top-earning romantic drama in global grosses since Fifty Shades Freed ($372 million) in February 2018.

Between audiences not giving a shit about Will Smith’s Oscar-night slap 2.5 years ago and audiences not caring about whatever the Internet is talking about concerning the Colleen Hoover adaptation, Sony’s summer was a masterclass in A) making big profits on reasonably budgeted pictures and B) allowing the films themselves to drown out the noise and proving once again that online discourse does not correlate to real-world results.