The long awaited The Batman knocked off a few records as it became the highest grossing film of the year so far, the second-biggest domestic opening of the pandemic era just behind Spider-Man: No Way Home, beat Christian Bale’s Batman Begins opening, and became the 4th highest grossing Batman movie on opening weekend of all time.
Over the long weekend, audiences came out to theaters once again for Tom Holland, who starred in the newly released Uncharted. Other wide film openings were drama starring Channing Tatum, Dog and horror film The Cursed. Uncharted opened at $43.8M totaling $51M after the holiday weekend, proving that the Tom Holland hype from Spider-Man is not over.
The Pre-Valentine’s Day crowd took over the movie theaters grossing $49.5M this past week. The openings of Death on the Nile, Marry Me, and Blacklight proved to be popular date night movies approaching today’s festivities. The latest installment of the Agatha Christie franchise Death on the Nile opened at $12.8M over the weekend. The crime drama is centered around sleuth Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh), who investigates the murder of a honeymooning heiress (Gal Gadot). It scored 66% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an impressive $3,902 per-screen average at over 3,200 locations.
There is something to be said about the relationship between pumping money into a product versus the quality of the outcome. On paper, a film about men pranking each other – backed by a modest budget of $10M – should probably not outgross an “original” movie that has $146M in resources. But that is exactly what happened this weekend – why? Because sometimes audiences would rather sign up for a laugh and not a long-winded, space-disaster movie.
With no new wide-releases, you would normally expect a lag in the box-office – unless there was a strong rotation of titles in theaters. And that’s exactly what they had! Moviegoers came back this weekend to watch (or re-watch) well-liked titles that released last year. Overall, the box-office collected an impressive $35.6M.
Amid a $47M weekend with no new, “must-see” releases (we’ll get to those later), Spider-Man: No Way Homeeasily swings back to the number one spot with another $14M. Dropping just 29.7% from last weekend, Spider-Man continues to benefit from phenomenal word-of-mouth, and the lack of competition. The third installment of the Marvel/Sony Spider-Man franchise has brought in a box-office total of $721M – making it the fourth highest-grossing domestic film of all time (behind Avatar’s $760.5M). Worldwide, Spidey claims the sixth highest gross with $1.69B.
January is typically a slower month at the box-office. That is not to say that January is slow month for moviegoing. In recent years, studios have seen success with dropping event-level films first: American Sniper, Bad Boys for Life, Ride Along, Kung Fu Panda 3, Glass, Cloverfield, and Split – these all opened north of $40M.
FEMALE SUPERHEROES Looking for a Female Superhero film? Take a look at this recent selection!
2018’s BIGGEST BLOCKBUSTERS The 10 highest grossing films from 2018 (from largest to smallest)
Before the year’s biggest tentpole Spider-Man: No Way Home hits the big screen, Disney launched a film of a very different flavor this weekend. Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story aimed to fill the calm before the storm – leveraging the director’s pedigree, positive reviews, a beloved narrative, and growing Oscar buzz to get moviegoers out of their homes.
Over the five-day break (Wed 11/24 to Sun 11/28), the box-office cooked up $139.5M – with $94.9M of that earned during the three-day weekend. Despite falling short from pre-covid norms, the Thanksgiving weekend offers three highlights. First, that five-day total is seven times better than Thanksgiving 2020 – back when many theaters were shuttered, when the only box-office pull was The Croods: A New Age, and before it was possible to vaccinate.
Our Trailer Pack engineers experimented with artificial intelligence to write some of our movie descriptions. We think they’re better than what many of the studios have written! Whenever you see “[ai]” at the end of the text, we’ve used some of the most powerful natural language processing in the world. Check out the various descriptions and we’d love to hear what you think of them at ai@trailerpack.com
