Weekend Box Office: 'Beekeeper' Stings With $19 Million While 'Book of Clarence' Stumbles

Jason Statham scored a personal best, while 'Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes' and 'Godzilla Minus One' reached their own box office milestones

In weekend box office news not related to Mean Girls opening with $32 million domestic and Wonka crossing $505 million worldwide... 

Jason Statham set a personal best with David Ayer’s The Beekeeper. The 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 $19 million over the Fri-Mon holiday, including $16.8 million over the Fri-Sun frame (and $3.2 million in Imax – a rousing 16.7% -- over the long weekend). That’s higher than the $16.5 million Fri-Sun debut of Transporter 2 in 2005, although that PG-13 action sequel earned $20.1 million over its Fri-Mon Labor Day opening.  

Whether you want to count Amazon MGM Studios’ The Beekeeper as Statham’s third-biggest top-billed Fri-Sun opener behind the Meg movies or his biggest R-rated solo action opener, it’s a milestone. He’s been doing this for well over 20 years, as I explained to my 12-year-old who wondered if we were getting The Beekeeper 2 (it was his first non-Meg Statham rodeo). Going back to the very early 2000s, most of his films of this nature are thrilled to open with $10 million and make it to $25 million domestically.  

This $19 million Fri-Mon estimate will be bigger than the lifetime cume Safe (my pick for his best star vehicle action movie) and Expendables 4 (uh... lower on that list). If it even legs to $45 million, not impossible with Amazon’s marketing muscle and decent buzz (sorry), it’ll be the actor’s biggest-grossing star vehicle in raw domestic grosses save for Fast Saga sequels, the Meg movies and ensembles like The Italian Job, Spy and the first two Expendables movies.  

No, I’m not counting cameos in Collateral and The Pink Panther or his animated turn in Gnomeo and Juliet, so don’t be a smart ass.  

The Beekeeper is easily Ayer’s most enjoyable film since uh... his movies don’t tend to be “fun,” but it’s probably his best overall effort since End of Watch. It mixes unapologetically silly plotting (Statham’s Beekeeper is, unlike the other members of his super-secret world-protecting murder group, actually a beekeeper, and I appreciate that the movie doesn’t bother to explain this) and refreshingly timely “young tech bros are the bad guys” (personified by Josh Hutcherson) plotting. It spends too much time with folks explaining that Beekeepers are unwelcome news for bad guys, and it offers a fascinating eventual conflict (even if it’s a bit... politically dog whistle-y in a Fox News-friendly fashion) that it doesn’t bother to unpack. But my son loved his first Statham actioner and the third act 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 with 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 which arguably introduced the action star to a broader audience. Mechanic: Resurrection and Wrath of Man both topped $100 million globally to become his biggest solo R-rated actioners worldwide, so we’ll see if The Beekeeper (which opened with $4.4 million in China) keeps pace. 

Sony/TriStar 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 absolute 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, produced and financed by Legendary as part of a multi-picture distribution deal with Sony, plays a similar trick as the western, offering a genre usually represented by white actors and filling the screen with Black performers while A) using the demographic difference for storytelling nuance and B) having an unapologetically pulpy time with it. Samuel’s current vibe of “super-duper representational milestone... but also a fun 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 $3.2 million in its Fri-Mon debut. I’ve been whining about this at least since Drew Barrymore’s Whip It bombed in late 2009. 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. No whining today, but if you have the time, it looks really good on a noticeably big screen. 

Walt Disney released Soul into theaters yesterday, as a “sorry we shunted your Pixar masterpiece to Disney+ in a short-sighted attempt to please Wall Street and please see Pixar movies in theaters again” mea culpa. They’ll do likewise with Turning Red on February 9 and Luca on March 22. The Jamie Foxx/Tina Fey toon, which justly won Best Animated Feature in 2021, earned $550,000 over its Fri-Mon weekend. I will check it out in theaters as I always regretted not being able to, but I’m waiting to see if my indecisive children want to tag along.  

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 27% over the Fri-Sun frame for a $6.9 million Fri-Sun/$8.5 million Fri-Mon weekend. It’ll have $56 million domestically and $79 million worldwide (over triple its $25 million budget) by Monday night. Illumination’s Migration will earn $8.3 million over the Fri-Mon weekend for a new $88 million cume as it makes a play for $100 million domestic. The $72 million original has earned $173 million worldwide.  

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom will earn $6.2 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. Meanwhile, it has earned $373 million worldwide, including $33 million in Imax, putting it on a course to a $400 million global total. There have been just three Hollywood flicks that have passed $350 million worldwide since Barbie and Oppenheimer in mid-July of last year. All three (Meg 2: The Trench, Wonka and Aquaman 2) were Warner Bros. Discovery releases.

Blumhouse’s Night Swim understandably drowned on weekend two, earning $4 million (-66%) over the Fri-Sun frame and $4.7 million over the holiday for a $20 million 11-day total. Oh, and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes has reached $165 million domestically from a $44.8 million debut weekend, meaning it is the leggiest pre-Thanksgiving YA title ever ahead of even (larger grosses notwithstanding) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone ($318 million from a $90 million debut) and Frozen II ($477 million/$130 million). Godzilla Minus One 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 625 theaters over the weekend, where it will earn $1.9 million (+93%) over the Fri-Sun part of a $2.2 million Fri-Mon weekend. That’s a merely okay $3,728 per-theater average and $5.615 million domestic cume. Hope springs eternal and this Cord Jefferson-directed and Jeffrey Wright-starring comedy should end up in the thick of the Oscar race. Whether that moves the needle among moviegoers is still 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 $2.17 million over the holiday for a $17.7 million cume. It just passed Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch to become Searchlight’s second-biggest Covid-era release behind The Menu ($38.5 million). Once it passes $20 million domestically, it’ll be the fourth Covid-era platformer to do so following Everything Everywhere All At Once ($77 million), A Man Called Otto ($64 million) and Asteroid City ($28 millon). Again, fingers crossed that awards glory for the Emma Stone-starring sci-fi comedy will lead to leggy theatrical business closer to those first two than the third.