Battle at the Box Office 5/20/24

IF took the top spot at the box office over the weekend with a decent opening, but Summer 2024 is still not quite delivering blockbuster-sized numbers.

IF made $33.7 million over the weekend, down from its estimated $35 million announced on Sunday and early today.  Predictions were around $40-50 million, so it’s a slightly disappointing debut.  Worldwide, IF has made $57.7 million.  It had a $110 million budget, so it will need to make around $200 million to be in a break-even range, let alone make a profit while in theaters.  The Garfield Movie is out domestically in two weeks, so IF has one more weekend of uncontested family audience attention.  The CinemaScore was an A, so word of mouth should be strong, but we’ll have to see how it does this coming weekend.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes dropped 55% from last weekend and made another $26 million.  It now has $101.2 million domestically and $237.5 million worldwide, making it the only hit so far of Summer 2024.  It is currently tracking right between Rise and War of the Planet of Apes and is looking at probably around $160 million domestically.

The Strangers: Chapter 1 opened to third place with $12 million.  That’s up from The Strangers: Prey at Night, which opened to just over $10 million in 2018 but not topping the original The Strangers, which made just under $21 million in 2008.  The budget was a low $8.5 million, and Lionsgate has two more Strangers movies coming out later this year.  The movie got a fairly standard C from CinemaScore, and we’ll have to see how much Furiosa and other competition this coming weekend sucks away from the box office.

Challengers and Back in Black rounded out the top 5.  The latter, an Amy Winehouse biopic, is extremely low compared to other recent musical biopics, like Bob Marley: One Love from earlier this year.  Most recent musical biopics have opened over $20+ million.  The movie got lambasted by critics but seemed to fare slightly better with audiences, with an 86% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  It did have a mixed B+ so we’ll have to see if audiences are going to stick around in the next weekend or two or if it will nosedive.

Further down the list, the IMAX movie The Blue Angels, narrated by Glen Powell, took 9th place in 227 theaters with $1.3 million.  The movie got a limited IMAX run before coming to Prime Video later this year.

Neon’s Babes took the Per Theater average with $14,277 in each of the 12 theaters it played in over the weekend.