Battle at the Box Office 3/20/23
Although Shazam! Fury of the Gods took the top spot at the box office this past weekend, it’s nowhere near what WB Discovery was probably looking for from the opening of one of their big franchise movies.
Fury of the Gods opened to $30.1 million, well below expectations and well below both what the first Shazam! movie made in 2019, which was $53.5 million, and last year’s Black Adam, which made $67 million. Critics were extremely mixed but the audience score was fairly solid on Rotten Tomatoes and it got a B+ Cinemascore from opening night audiences. With the news that James Gunn and Peter Safran are fully rebooting the DC Universe in a few years, audiences might feel that there is no point seeing any of these lingering legacy DC movies but we’ll have to see how The Flash does later this summer to see if the trend continues. Fury of the Gods made $64.7 million worldwide, which again, is less than what Black Adam made with just its domestic opening last year.
Scream VI had a fairly steep drop to second place with $17.5 million, losing 61% of last week’s opening. It’s still the best second weekend for the Scream franchise and it’s closing in on topping the total domestic gross for 2022’s Scream with around $5 million separating them. Worldwide, it has topped Scream 4’s total and is about $22 million behind 2022’s Scream
Creed III dropped to third place with another $15.3 million, bringing it to $127.6 million domestically and $224.2 million worldwide. It has probably already passed the unadjusted domestic total of Rocky IV to become the highest-grossing Rocky/Creed movie of all time and should easily top Rocky and Rocky IV worldwide. Of course, if you adjust for inflation, those movies are much higher than Creed III, with the original Rocky at over half a billion dollars adjusted for inflation, but it’s still impressive for the ninth film in the franchise to be this successful.
65 and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania rounded out the top 5, with the former dropping 53% from last weekend’s opening and taking in another $5.8 million, bringing 65 to $22.4 million domestically and $38.8 million worldwide. Quantumania is up to $205.8 million domestically and $462.6 million worldwide.
The Per Theater average went to L’Innocent aka The Innocent, which was playing in one theater over the weekend and took in $12,079 for that theater.