Audiences have One Love for Bob Marley, no love for Madame Web, and all the Box Office News you missed over the last two months.
Like a weirdly sad parent who can sometimes be found staring off uncomfortably into space that walked out “to buy milk” then didn’t come home for almost three months, the Box Office Report has crawled out of hibernation to once again fill you in on industry news via the method of rapidly-collapsing metaphors! And since it is your only source on financial performances of Hollywood films – you definitely did not go and read anybody else’s whilst I was away, don’t lie to me – you’re now on hands and knees begging me to fill you in on what you missed. Who won the Xmas rush? Which films best benefited from the Oscar nominations bump? Did we get a single notable breakout during the dump month of January? Relax, everybody! Let me assure you that, err, you didn’t miss much at all, to be honest. To the bullet points!
- Wonka is one of just three films to pull off an outright win during our hiatus. The surprisingly good (to anybody who didn’t go in knowing it was by the same creative team which brought us the Paddington movies) Willy Wonka prequel musical is the highest-grossing release since TAYLOR SWIFT | THE ERAS TOUR, currently sitting at $209 million in its tenth week. This long tail can be partly attributed to it being a great damn family film, but equally as much (if not more so) due to fuck-all else being out in the meantime.
- The other outright win? Jason Statham’s The Beekeeper, of all things, which posted a respectable $16.5 million debut and has pumped out solid holds week-on-week ever since mid-January. Where its flashier release-week-mate Mean Girls – that’s the abysmal musical remake, not the bona fide classic we still quote on Wednesdays – debuted at #1 with $28 mil yet has plummeted down and out the chart (finishing on $71 mil domestic and $101 mil worldwide), Beekeeper is still here at #7 with $60 mil total domestic and $143 mil worldwide. All hail the Statham-renaissance!
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- On the sleeper-hit end of the scale, rom-com throwback Anyone But You started out falling on its arse over the Xmas weekend but has since quietly chugged along with some of the most impressive week-on-week holds I’ve seen for a long time. It won’t quite break $100 mil domestic when all’s said and done, but its $85 mil bow here is easily the best for a rom-com since the pandemic started. Sadly won’t be enough to convince Netflix execs to give Glen Powell’s other steamy rom-com, Hit Man, a cinema release cos they’re allergic to money, but it’s irrefutable proof that the people love that himbo Powell smoulder!
- Technically, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom isn’t an outright failure, having cracked $123 mil domestic and $433 mil worldwide, but I’d argue those numbers were entirely due to inertia and require forgetting that the film cost about $215 million to make. It immediately fell behind Wonka’s third week in its sophomore frame and you already forgot this thing even came out instead of getting shitcanned alongside Coyote vs. ACME.
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- None of the Oscar nominees received much in the way of a proper financial bump cos, in a shock twist, most of the Best Pictures had already been out for months. American Fiction, Poor Things, and The Zone of Interest are arguably the closest thing to beneficiaries, but their distributors also refused to open them Wide until the nominations came in and promptly sent them back to the limited runs after a week which makes it hard to judge.
- Oh, and Argylle came out. Turns out the real Agent Argylle was the people who stayed away from Matthew Vaughn’s latest disaster as this $200 million (HOW?!) spy flick is yet to break $80 mil worldwide despite now being in its third week.
On to pastures fresh, then. And the big question going into this elongated holiday weekend – where studios put their films out on Valentine’s (a Wednesday) to try and capitalise on greeting card company-mandated date night – was whether or not people would get up, stand up for Bob Marley: One Love, the latest in the simplistic music biopic subgenre because Walk Hard couldn’t get the job done when it shot the sheriff. Could he be loved? Emphatically, as it turns out! Whilst the three-day ended up coming in a million shy of Mean Girls in the contest for 2024’s best opening so far ($27.7 mil to $28.6 mil), One Love saw audiences jamming and stirring it up for the reggae legend, easily topping the weekend domestic chart and scoring a five-day of $45.5 mil. You may be asking “is this love?” since the film cost $70 mil to make, but the “A” Cinemascore indicates that it did indeed satisfy America’s soul, whilst the exodus to international markets has been similarly fruitful; $29 mil overall, #1 in 13 markets, and the biggest opening weekend of all-time in Jamaica. Guarantee there’ll be no Paramount execs no cry at these results.
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Making headlines of a different kind, everybody give it up for Madame Web! They said it couldn’t be done! That Sony’s catastrophic Spider-Villain-verse couldn’t sink any lower! That we’d hit the bottom of the barrel with 2022’s Morbius, a movie so boringly awful that our relentless meme-ing of the far more entertaining movie we’d concocted in our heads somehow convinced the studio to re-release the thing back into cinemas so it could bomb all over again! Instead, not only did Madame Web manage to somehow record a worse critic score than Morbius, it’s also managed to post the absolute worst opening weekend for any superhero movie in almost half-a-decade (not counting The New Mutants which opened to $7 million in the middle of the pandemic), maybe even longer than that if you don’t count Hellboy (2019) as a true superhero film. $15.1 mil for the three-day and $23.3 mil for the five-day, plus an abominable “C+” Cinemascore. That’s some true dead on arrival shit, folks! Gotta give props; Sony set out to murder the superhero/comic book movie boom from the inside and are doing a sterling job of it!
As the kids say, we’re so back. Here’s the Full List.
US Box Office Results: Friday 16th February 2024 – Sunday 18th February 2023
1] Bob Marley: One Love
$27,700,000 / $45,571,205 / NEW
Will be seeing this at some point before next week’s report. I want to believe it’ll be good, partly because I hope all movies are good, but mainly because it’s by Reinaldo Marcus Green who did King Richard and that also looked pretty terrible in the pre-release material. So there’s previous in marketing doing the guy’s films dirty.
2] Madame Web
$15,150,000 / $23,354,619 / NEW
Ditto seeing this before next week. For now, I’d like to congratulate everybody reading on not falling for the avant-garde marketing campaign which tried to reverse-Uno-flip y’all by having its stars nearly outright admit they made a total piece of shit, creating expectations of it being some sort of camp “so bad, it’s good” disasterpiece. Really proud of you. Now, give it another few weeks, then start with the memes. I want to see if Sony fall for the Morbius method again and re-release Madame Web a few months down the line; it’d be the funniest thing!
3] Argylle
$4,720,000 / $36,468,480
If I had a nickel for every time Sam Rockwell starred as an assassin in an action rom-com with a talented actress which had no right to be this boring, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice, right?
4] Migration
$3,750,000 / $114,827,995
Oh, yeah. Illumination released another film during our hiatus. I keep forgetting that happened.
5] The Chosen: S4 Episodes 4 – 6
$3,443,070 / $4,220,036 / NEW
Fathom have got a solidly reliable little revenue stream here, making theatrical package movie events out of a niche-ish TV show. Never gonna light up the charts, and each go has been earning slightly less money than the last, but I also bet they cost sod all to promote so it’s nearly all profit all the time. Yet another way that anime (which have been doing stuff like this for years) has corrupted American society!
6] Wonka
$3,400,000 / $209,821,297
Gotta say, I’m kinda annoyed that One Love ended up doing well cos I had planned a whole bit about how Timothée Chalamet is single-handedly keeping the Box Office alive right now – Wonka being the biggest film of the year post-Barbenheimer, and Dune: Part Two arriving in two weeks to finally wake up the 2024 release slate. Why won’t you all think about me? My plight? The hardworking hobbyist writer failing to make a paying career out of being mildly unfunny?
7] The Beekeeper
$3,254,000 / $59,895,503
Even outside of my being inclined to enjoy Jason Statham films more than the average person, I had an utter blast with this. Starts out like an above-average John Wick rip-off, then pulls off its mask at the halfway mark to reveal itself as actually being most inspired by the giddy audacity of 24. Had a smile on my face the whole dang time, even though Statham doesn’t kill anybody with bees.
8] Anyone But You
$2,415,000 / $84,711,912
Honestly impressed by how this film can be sweet, genuinely romantic, and have a pair of leads who are supernova hot, charismatic, and with great chemistry… yet still fail to be funny even once. It’s inspiring, in a way.
9] Lisa Frankenstein
$2,030,000 / $7,664,150
Some of the people who have actually seen Zelda Williams’ directorial debut keep invoking Jennifer’s Body, both because it’s also written by Diablo Cody and just in its own right, which is like the batsignal to queer girlies/enbys such as myself. Looking forward to chasing down Dune with it.
10] Land of Bad
$1,800,000 / NEW
No, that’s not the nickname for BORs each week. Rather, it’s the kind of semi-mid-budget action-thriller with slumming stars you normally see consigned to direct-to-video/digital land. Yet, this one got a proper cinema release. Torn between celebrating this development, since we could do with more schlocky action cinema getting low-expectations theatrical runs, and seeing it as an indicator of how dire the studio slates are right now after last year’s strikes threw a monkey wrench in everything.
Dropped out: Mean Girls (2024), American Fiction, Poor Things