Battle at the Box Office 11/25/24
As expected, Wicked dominated the weekend box office with Gladiator II coming in a solid second place.
Wicked opened to $112.5 million, which is the third best opening ever for a movie musical behind 2017’s Beauty and the Beast and Frozen II. It’s the biggest opening ever for a movie based on a stage production, crushing the previous high water mark of $31.1 million set by Into the Woods. It’s also the biggest opening ever for star Cynthia Erivo and director Jon M. Chu. Worldwide, Wicked has $162.9 million grossed so far. Audiences gave the movie an A CinemaScore, so word of mouth will keep it high on the box office charts for quite a while.
Gladiator II opened to $55 million domestically, and it has $220.3 million so far worldwide. The original Gladiator opened to $34.8 million unadjusted for inflation back in 2000. It’s the second biggest opening for Ridley Scott behind Hannibal and the first movie he’s made that opened above $50 million since The Martian. The movie got a B CinemaScore so it may not hold as well as Wicked but should remain strong through the upcoming holiday weekend.
Red One slipped to third place with another $13.2 million, dropping almost 60% from last weekend’s opening. That’s a steep drop for a movie aimed at family’s and it seems like Wicked sucked away most of that audience. Red One is now at $52.8 million domestically and $118 million worldwide. Given its performance, it could lose Amazon potentially $100 million but the company seems to believe the boost to Prime Video and digital sales/rentals will off set the $250 million they spent on it.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin and Venom: The Last Dance rounded out the top 5. The former is the latest from Angel Studios and it opened to $5 million, which is the fifth best opening for the studio but they haven’t been able to match the lightning in a bottle performance of Sound of Freedom, which opened to over $40 million.
Wicked also had the best Per Theater average with $28,937 in each of the 3,888 theaters it played in over the weekend.
