Battle at the Box Office 7/26/21
M. Night Shyamalan took the top spot at the box office this weekend with his latest movie Old but it was overall a lackluster and underperforming weekend.
Old took in $16.8 million, which despite taking #1 is still below expectations and the lowest opening of M. Night’s career. The previous low for M. Night was Lady in the Water, which opened to just over $18 million back in 2006 and well below his last movie, Glass, which opened $40.3 million back in 2019. Old had a worldwide opening of $23.6 million.
Snake Eyes opened to second place with a mediocre $13.4 million, which is way off from the opening of either of the previous GI Joe live-action movies. Those movies had bigger casts and bigger budgets but Paramount probably still isn’t pleased with this attempt to reboot the franchise. The new way Paramount movies work for streaming also means that Snake Eyes will be available to Paramount+ subscribers in a little over 40 days. Concerns and wariness in many parts of the US about the Delta variant of Covid-19 that is sweeping through unvaccinated populations plus the start of the Olympics in Tokyo may be two of the factors that could explain the underperformance of the theatrical market this past weekend.
Black Widow dropped to third place with $11.6 million, 55% down from last weekend when it had its extremely steep 67% drop. The movie has made $154.8 million domestic and $314.9 million worldwide so far, plus whatever it has made on Disney+ after the initial $60 million it made on opening weekend on the streaming platform.
Space Jam: A New Legacy and F9 rounded out the top 5 with the former seeing a massive 69% drop from last week’s opening weekend. Reviews for Space Jam were not great and its availability on HBO Max is probably losing the movie a lot of repeat business in theaters. If a family went to see Space Jam last weekend in theaters and wanted to see it again and they have HBO Max, there’s pretty much no reason to go back to theaters again. Space Jam: A New Legacy has made just under $94 million worldwide.
Escape Room: Tournament of Champions slipped out of the top 3 in its second weekend, falling to sixth place with another $3.5 million. It has $24.2 million worldwide so far for two weeks out.
The Per Theater average went to Ailey, a documentary from Neon about choregrapher Alvin Ailey, which took in $7,546 in each of the two theaters it played in.