Battle at the Box Office 2/17/25
As expected, Captain America: Brave New World took the top spot over the Valentine’s Day/President’s Day weekend, although it’s a middle-of-the-road opening for the MCU.
Brave New World opened to $87.8 million for the three-day weekend and an estimated four-day weekend with the holiday around $100 million. That three-day total is third overall in the Captain America sub-series of the MCU, topping only The First Avenger, and for the total MCU, it sits between Spider-Man: Far From Home and Thor: The Dark World. Worldwide, the movie has a total of $180.2 million. Critical response was pretty tepid, but audience reaction on sites like Rotten Tomatoes seems stronger, so we’ll have to see how it fares in its second weekend.
Paddington in Peru took second place with $13 million for the three-day weekend. That’s slightly better than Paddington 2’s opening back in 2018, but the first movie is still far and away the biggest opening in the series so far. It got a strong A CinemaScore from audiences and strong reviews from critics, so it seems like it might have legs to hang around for a while. This domestic release takes the movie’s worldwide total to $128.8 million.
Heart Eyes seems like the biggest benefactor of the weekend’s Valentine’s Day holiday, increasing 20% from last weekend and making another $10 million for a total of $21.5 million domestically.
Dog Man and Ne Zha 2 rounded out the top 5. Paddington in Peru might have taken a big chunk of Dog Man’s audience, dropping from first to fourth with $9.7 million. It’s made $66.8 million domestically. Ne Zha 2, which now has the record for the biggest movie ever in a single market with over $1 billion in China, opened with $7.2 million in 660 theaters domestically. That is way up from the first Ne Zha‘s domestic opening, which was around $1.2 million.
Love Hurts continued to slip, falling out of the top 5 in its second weekend and taking sixth place with $4.3 million, bringing it to $12.2 million domestically for two weeks out. Companion also dropped from fifth to ninth with $1.8 million, bringing it to $18.7 million.
The best per-theater average went to Captain America: Brave New World, which earned $21,389 in each of the 4,105 theaters it played over the weekend.
