Battle at the Box Office 2/10
Birds of Prey managed to take the top spot at the box office but it definitely was not the type of opening WB/DC were looking for.
Birds of Prey (And The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) opened to $33 million, which is the lowest opening in the DCEU, $20 million below what Shazam! made last year and $100 million less than what Suicide Squad made its opening weekend. It’s also $63 million less than recent Oscar winner Joker made last year in its opening weekend, also with an R rating. There’s a lot of analysis and debate about what went wrong, it may have cut off a large chunk of the audience who may have seen it with the R rating, its ties to the deeply unpopular Suicide Squad may have hurt it, who knows? It made $81 million total worldwide, which is technically breaking even with its budget but the budge doesn’t factor in marketing or promotions and studios are usually looking for at least 2x the budget, if not more, worldwide to consider a movie a success. Next week will definitely be a test to see if word of mouth can get more people into the theater or if it will crash and burn.
Bad Boys for Life dropped to second place with another $12 million, bringing it to over $166 million domestic and over $336 million worldwide.
1917 had a ridiculously low drop from last weekend, only losing 3% of its box office and pulling in another $9.2 million, bringing it to $132 million domestic and over $287 million worldwide.
Dolittle and Jumanji rounded out the top 5, with Jumanji also having an insane hold by dropping only 7% from last weekend and staying in top 5 for its ninth weekend of release. It has made over $768 million worldwide but it probably won’t get to the level of its predecessor, which almost made $1 billion worldwide.
A bunch of the recent Oscar winners and nominees saw boosts as the award show aired this past Sunday. Knives Out moved back into the top 10, going to eleventh to ninth with another $2.4 million and it has made just shy of $300 million worldwide. Best Picture winner Parasite and JoJo Rabbit also moved up from their positions last week.
The Assistant remained the Per Theater winner, making $29,458 in each of the four theaters it played in over the weekend.