Author: Alex Fisch

With four new releases and an amazing sophomore weekend from last week’s headliner, this weekend’s total box-office is $62.4M. That is just -41% from the same late August weekend in 2019. Despite the Delta variant’s rising case-counts, the players of the movie industry – audiences, theaters, and studios – show no signs of backpedaling. As theaters in major cities (New York, San Francisco, New Orleans) roll out “vaccine passports”, moviegoers should feel more comfortable in making the trip to the big screen.

Free Guy is the top ranking movie this past weekend with a $28.4M debut – well ahead of the industry’s expectations. The Disney/20th Century Studio film stars Ryan Reynolds, Jodie Comer (if you haven’t seen Killing Eve, you are missing out), Joe Keery (Stranger Things) and a number of cameos from well-known stars that support the film’s videogame meta-humor.

The August box-office kicks things off with The Suicide Squad – the James Gunn directed follow up to 2016’s Suicide Squad, which holds the record for biggest August opening ever ($133.7M). Of course, no-one expected the sequel (semi-reboot) to earn anywhere near that. The $26.5M that The Suicide Squad ran away with this weekend lines up with realistic expectations.

Although moviegoers have already seen a number of horror films this summer – A Quiet Place II, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It and the Forever Purge – the audience for the genre has not decayed. Old took the number one spot with a $16.5M opening weekend. Director Shyamalan has been on a hit streak after the successes of The Visit, Split, and Glass.

Ready to feel old? I remember when this classic was the party song throughout my grade school. I never liked basketball growing up (I could never dribble the ball) but you can bet I had a Space Jam themed birthday! So I am glad that Space Jam: A New Legacy was well-received by moviegoers.

Two years since Spider-man: Far From Home, Marvel is finally back in theaters with Black Widow. There has never been such a gap between the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies before. Granted, Marvel fans have been treated to three series on Disney Plus – WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki – that serve as opening acts for their headliners: the MCU movies.

Q3 2021 opens with a triple combo from Universal studios: a tentpole in its sophomore weekend and two new releases in F9, The Boss Baby: Family Business, and The Forever Purge. Altogether, the three films contributed $65.8M to the 4-day haul of the July 4th weekend, which totaled $87.6M.

The summer blockbuster is back! Universal’s F9 raises the pandemic-imposed speed limit at the box-office. The latest entry of the Fast & Furious saga broke several pandemic-era records! Booked in over 4,000 domestic theaters, F9 is the widest release since March 2020. The film did not only break the highest single-day box-office with $30M on Friday, but also set a new benchmark for opening weekends with a three-day total of $70M.

With the long-awaited F9 slated for this Friday June 25, Lionsgate gave The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard a Wednesday release to set some space between it and the upcoming blockbuster. Although the studio was not planning on it, with Juneteenth (June 19) becoming a federal holiday, and many business giving employees Friday off, this weekend’s box-office was possibly boosted by the double-holiday weekend.

After four weekends of jump-scares and thrills dominating the box-office, new releases In the Heights and Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway offer lighter, feel-good options to returning moviegoers. However, neither of the new films managed to beat the junior weekend of Paramount’s A Quiet Place II – a total of $11.7M.

Memorial Day weekend delivered an amazing start to the summer blockbuster drumroll, with A Quiet Place II setting a pandemic record opening and matching that of its 2018 predecessor. In its second weekend, Paramount’s horror film raked in another $19.5M – a holdover of 41% from last weekend’s three-day haul (standard for horror movies pre-pandemic). Accumulating a total of $89M thus far, A Quiet Place II should have no trouble crossing the $100M milestone domestically.

Going into the Memorial Day Weekend, the U.S. reported the lowest number of COVID-19 cases and the largest number of travelers across the nation’s airports since the start of the pandemic. People are on the move again. This holiday marks the first “maskless” holiday in over a year.