Battle at the Box Office 6/12/23

In the battle of Spider-People vs Transformers, the Autobots/Maximals won this round as Transformers: Rise of the Beasts was the #1 movie at the box office over the weekend.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts took in $61 million for the weekend, topping Across the Spider-Verse by around $6 million.  This opening is a huge step up from the recent entries in the Transformers series, as The Last Knight opened to $44.6 million in 2017 and this movie’s predecessor, Bumblebee, only made $21.6 million.  It’s possible that people were extremely burned out from Last Knight and Michael Bay’s exhausting, stupid series and skipped Bumblebee in theaters, but found it on home media and streaming and discovered it was actually really good, so they returned to the theater for this one.  There are possibly also a lot of 90s kids like us who were finally able to see the Transformers they grew up with, the Beast Wars characters, on the big screen.  Reviews were also solid and it got an A- CinemaScore, so word of mouth should be strong.  Worldwide, Rise of the Beasts has $171 million so far.  The biggest opening for the Transformers franchise was Revenge of the Fallen, which made just over $108 million in 2009.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse dropped 54% from last week’s huge opening and made another $55.5 million.  That drop is slightly higher than Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 but it is almost dead even with the drop of Into the Spider-Verse back in December 2018.  Across the Spider-Verse has $225.5 million domestically so far for two weeks out and just over $390 million worldwide.

The Little Mermaid dropped to third with $22.7 million.  It has $228.8 million domestically so far and $414.2 million worldwide.  It’s performing almost identically so far, at least domestically, to Aladdin, which if it continues that pace would put it at around $350-360 million total domestically.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and The Boogeyman rounded out the top 5, with the latter having a solid hold in its second weekend with only a 44% drop and making another $6.9 million, bringing it to $24.7 million domestic.

Further down the list, Past Lives jumped into the top 10, taking 10th place with $520,772 in 26 theaters.  That also gave it the best Per Theater average for the weekend with $20,030 in each theater.