Battle at the Box Office 4/24/23
The Super Mario Bros. Movie remains a juggernaut at the box office in its third weekend but Evil Dead Rise was a solid second place in its opening weekend.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie made another $59.9 million over the weekend, bringing it to $436 million domestically and $878.1 million worldwide. The movie seems like it will almost certainly make over $1 billion worldwide and needs $1.15 billion to become the biggest Illumination movie of all time, Minions. Super Mario is comfortably the biggest movie of the year both domestically and worldwide and its lead will only continue to grow in the next couple of weeks.
Evil Dead Rise saw its box office total grow throughout Sunday and into today as projections and then the eventual total was being revised. The fifth entry in the Evil Dead franchise took in $24.5 million, just shy of Fede Alvarez’s remake in 2013, which made $25.8 million. It is above other big horror movies from last year, like Smile, The Black Phone, and Barbarian, although it’s behind M3GAN, which opened to over $30 million earlier this year. The movie earned a B CinemaScore, which is actually solid for a horror movie. Worldwide, Evil Dead Rise has $42.4 million. The movie was originally going to head straight to HBO Max, so the decision to move it to theaters seems like a smart one.
Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant opened in third place with $6.3 million. That’s extremely low compared to other similar movies like 12 Strong, American Sniper, and Lone Survivor, with the lowest wide release for one of those films being 12 Strong with just over $15 million, still over double of The Covenant. It is double what this year’s other Guy Ritchie movie, Operation Fortune, made in March but below 2021’s Wrath of Man. For Jake Gyllenhaal, the opening of The Covenant is between Everest and Rendition. The movie has not had any sort of international release yet.
John Wick Chapter 4 and Air rounded out the top 5.
Further down the list, The Pope’s Exorcist and Renfield both saw pretty steep drops, with The Pope’s Exorcist dropping 62% and Renfield dropping just shy of 59%. Beau is Afraid opened wide in 965 theaters and jumped into the top 10 at 9th place with $2.7 million. The movie has $3.1 million for two weeks out domestically and just slightly more worldwide.
The Per Theater average went to The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which made $13,777 in each of the 4,350 theaters it was playing in over the weekend.