Battle at the Box Office 5/15/23
The Guardians of the Galaxy ruled Mother’s Day Weekend, seeing one of the lowest drops between the opening and second weekend in the history of the MCU.
Guardians Vol. 3 took in another $62 million over the weekend, dropping 48% from last weekend’s opening. Only Black Panther and Thor have lower drops between their opening and second weekends. This weekend’s total brings Guardians Vol. 3 to $214.7 million domestically for two weeks out and $530.3 million globally. It’s already outgrossed the entire box office run of Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania from earlier this year, highlighting how big a financial disaster that movie was. It’s closing in on The Wandering Earth 2 and Full River Red on the global charts, but The Super Mario Bros. Movie will probably retain its hold at the top of the charts with $1.2 billion worldwide. Guardians Vol. 3 is currently sitting between Iron Man and Ant-Man for the all-time worldwide grosses for the MCU.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie remained in second place with another $13 million, still only dropping 30% from the previous weekend in its 6th week of release. As mentioned earlier, it has just over $1.2 billion worldwide and is easily the highest-grossing film worldwide and domestically for 2023. For the all-time domestic box office, it’s currently in 15th place, behind 2019’s The Lion King, but will definitely surpass that by this coming weekend and will probably be close to, if not get into, the top 10 on the all-time chart. Super Mario is currently sitting at #23 on the all-time worldwide box office, behind The Fate of the Furious.
Book Club: The Next Chapter seemed unable to capitalize on its prime Mother’s Day opening weekend, coming in under even the most conservative estimates with $6.5 million. That’s around half of what the first Book Club movie made in 2018 and almost half of what 80 for Brady made earlier this year. It seems like moms and their families opted into Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret or Love Again, both of which had strong holds from their previous weekends, with Are You There God? even losing almost 1,000 theaters. Evil Dead Rise and Are You There God? rounded out the top 5.
Opening outside the top 5 was Hypnotic in sixth place with a disastrous $2.4 million. The movie had a budget of around $80 million, not counting things like advertising and other promotions, so it’s probably going to really hurt distributor Ketchup Entertainment. For comparison, the Hugh Jackman bomb Reminiscence had a similar opening in 2021 and it was hampered by HBO Max’s day and date experiment and it cost less than Hypnotic. Reminiscence had to make around $110 million globally to break even, which it didn’t, so Hypnotic theoretically would need to make more than that, which seems highly unlikely, especially with Fast X and other blockbusters in the next few weeks. Check back next week but we’re probably going to see a historically bad drop-off in Hypnotic’s second weekend.
Outside the top 10 was Knights of the Zodiac, which only made $559,000 in 586 theaters, and Blackberry, which made $740,000 in 449 theaters. Obviously, their budgets were wildly different and Blackberry is much more of a success.
The Per Theater average went to Monica, which made $13,938 in each of the 2 theaters it played in over the weekend.