Battle at the Box Office 1/15/24
The new musical version of Mean Girls took the top spot at the box office over the weekend, shoving former musical champ Wonka down to third place.
Mean Girls took in $28.6 million over the weekend, which tops the opening of the original, non-musical version of Mean Girls (if you don’t adjust for inflation). Although it knocked Wonka out of the top spot, it’s about $10 million below what that movie opened to in the holidays last year. Mean Girls may have an issue with staying power that will be decided in the next weekend or so, as it got a B CinemaScore, which means Paramount’s strategy of basically completely hiding the fact that it was a musical may have backfired and confused and/or angered a large contingent of the audience that was expecting a straightforward remake of the original. We’ll have to see how much it drops this coming weekend to see if that had an impact.
Jason Statham took second place with The Beekeeper, which opened to $16.5 million. Outside of The Meg movies and Fast & Furious, that is by far Statham’s best opening in recent years, double the openings of both Expend4bles and Wrath of Man and way up from the disaster that was Operation Fortune. It’s also the third best opening for director David Ayer behind Suicide Squad and Fury.
Wonka slipped to third place with another $8.4 million. It now has $176.2 million domestically and just under $508 million worldwide. It should pass or has already passed Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour to become the 10th biggest film worldwide for 2022.
Anyone But You and Migration took fourth and fifth place, with Anyone But You moving up to fourth after being fifth last weekend. Anyone But You has seen fantastic sustained business in the past few weeks, only dropping 27% from last weeekend. It now has $55.3 million domestically and $79.5 million worldwide. It’s already well surpassed its budget of around $25 million and could net a healthy profit for Sony.
Further down the list, Indian film Guntur Kaaram took 8th place with $4.1 million while the weekend’s other new release, The Book of Clarence, seems to be a disaster, barely making it into the top 10 at 10th place with only $2.5 million in 2,010 theaters. It’s not all time worst opening but it’s up there.
The Per Theater average went again to The Zone of Interest, which made $9,519 in each of the 25 theaters it was playing in over the weekend.