Weekend Wrap Up – a look at this week’s Industry Updates March 21, 2022 This weekend brought two new wide releases, horror films Umma and X, which helped the
The Batman continues to dominate in theaters with no new wide releases this weekend. The total box office gross over the weekend was $100.7M. The caped crusader remains on top, grossing $66M over the weekend bringing its gross total to $238.5M and pulled an impressive $14,942 per screen average in over 4,400 theaters. Stars of The Batman are in the spotlight as Zoe Kravitz, who plays Catwoman in the film, hosted Saturday Night Live over the weekend and discussed how she prepared for the role.
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.
Uncharted is yet another Tom Holland success grossing $23.2M, bringing its total gross to $83.3M. Sony Pictures CEO said that Uncharted is a, “new hit movie franchise” for Sony and is extremely optimistic about the future of the film due to its success in its box office and its 90% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
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.
