Wonder Woman 1984 easily wins the weekend, but unlike Gal Gadot, its legs are not spectacular.
Hopes that Wonder Woman 1984 would be the long-running hit the theater industry so desperately needs right now were largely dashed as the film's second weekend declined 2/3rds from its Christmas weekend opening. The $5.5 million it took in over New Year's weekend is still one of the best individual weekends of the pandemic, but it also suggests that most of the people who were eager to see Wonder Woman did so last weekend. There are a lot of factors as to why the film dived, including continued fears of the virus, the HBO Max deal, which will undoubtedly affect people who might have seen this more than once in the theater, and the film's quality. Its also entirely possible that, after this weekend, Wonder Woman will stabilize and have reasonably steady weekend grosses going forward. But theater owners who were hoping for a second straight weekend of huge sales have to be disappointed. The film's 10-day gross of $28.5 million does make it an easy third of all films released since theaters reopened in August, and it seems poised to pass The Croods: A New Age sometime in the next couple of weeks.
Speaking of Croods, it's having the sustained run that theaters are hoping that Wonder Woman will be able to pull off through January. It came in second for the weekend, taking in $2.2 million. That brings its total to $34.6 million, and with no other animated titles on the horizon until the animation/live-action hybrid Tom and Jerry arrives in late February, it could bop along with grosses above a million for a few more weeks.
Slipping to third, the Tom Hanks western News of the World remains an Oscar contender, but is attracting little business. It took in $1.7 million for a ten-day gross of $5.4 million. Even amid the pandemic, those are disappointing numbers. It now looks likely that this will be Hanks's lowest-grossing wide release since one of his earliest starring vehicles, the 1985 comedy The Man With One Red Shoe.
In fourth, Monster Hunter was the only other film to finish above a million dollars this weekend, taking in $1.3 million for a total of $6.3 million. As expectations were low and this looks like it might make it to $10 million, this has to count as a pandemic success story.
Four other movies finished above $100,000 this weekend. Thriller Fatale is likely to be regarded as a disappointment, with a gross so far of $3.1 million. So is Oscar contender Promising Young Woman, whose ten-day gross is only $1.9 million. At least it has grossed over a million total, unlike Pinocchio, whose total gross stands at $0.8 million. Finally, there's long-runner The War With Grandpa, which spends its 13th weekend in the Top 10. Who would have guessed that this silly Robert De Niro family comedy that was shot nearly four years ago and then bounced all over the schedule would be the leggiest film of the pandemic?
Rounding out the Top Ten was the re-release of the 1979 sci-fi horror classic Alien and new Halloween horror release Come Play, neither of which got particularly close to six figures.
This weekend looks like it could be more of the same, as nothing is going very wide. The biggest film opening appears to be an expansion of Amazon's Oscar contender One Night in Miami. The drama, directed by Oscar winner Regina King, takes place in a hotel room in 1964, in which Malcolm X, Jim Brown, Sam Cooke, and the soon-to-be renamed Cassius Clay gathered. The film has been in limited release since Christmas, but Amazon, which has, in the past released box office numbers for its films, has been silent about the grosses so far of this one. We'll see if they'll change course this weekend. If they do, expect this one to pop up in the Top 10. If they don't, expect everything to stay largely the same. We'll find out next week.
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