F9 roars to the biggest opening in a year and a half.
After a sluggish June, in which a number of highly anticipated titles failed to live up to even pandemic-modest expectations, the box office got a jolt of Nas with the arrival of F9, the latest installment in the now-20-year-old Fast and the Furious series, which has progressed from a reasonably realistic Point Break ripoff with cars instead of surfboards to cars flying through outer space. Audiences ate it up, and critics, who have long ago realized that their protests as the franchise got bigger and more ridiculous were falling for deaf ears, gave in and had fun themselves. F9 burst out of the gate with a $70 million opening, which is not only the best debut of the pandemic era, demolishing the month-old record held by A Quiet Place Part II, but the best opening since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker right before Christmas 2019. It will probably be a while before the box office has recovered enough for a new movie to top that $177 million opening, but for now, F9 (which opened better than Hobbs & Shaw in August 2019) will suffice.
The former gold standard of pandemic movies, the aforementioned Quiet Place 2, continued its strong run with a (distant) second place finish of $6.2 million. It has amassed a not-so-quiet $136.4 million so far, and can probably count on at least another couple of weeks of being the highest-grossing movie of 2021 until F9 roars past.
Last week's champ, the awkwardly-titled Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard, fell predictably to third, as most of its potential audience was at F9. It made $4.9 million for a twelve-day total of $25.9 million.
Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway opened soft, but has now established some decent legs. It came in fourth with $4.8 million, for a total of $28.8 million. We'll see how it holds up with another big family film in the mix this weekend.
Cruella also has proved to have decent legs, as it strode to a $3.8 million weekend, brining its total to $71.4 million. That was on Sunday, so by now, F9 has almost certainly passed it for 3rd on the year.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It took in another $3 million, for an OK total of $59.2 million. In the Heights, increasingly looking like the flop of the summer, could only scrape up $2.2 million for a total of $24.2 million. At this point, Heights making it to $30 million will be a miracle.
Spirit Untamed came in 8th with $1.1 million. That modest take represents a milestone, because it's the first time in the pandemic era that 8 films have made more than $1 million during the same weekend. The horse movie's gross is up to $15.9 million.
Rounding out the Top 10, Nobody rather unbelievably surges from last weekend's 22nd place, $16,000 take to this weekend's $0.6 million take, despite losing 2/3rds of its remaining screens and being wildly available on DVD and cheap PPV. If these numbers are to be believed, the revenge thriller is now up to $26.8 million. Twelve Mighty Orphans comes in tenth, with a total gross of $2.3 million.
Fourth of July weekend sees three new movies. Boss Baby: Family Business is a sequel to the hit 2017 animated film, in which the now-grown brothers from the first movie are turned back into babies by one of their infant daughters, who turns out to also be a boss baby. The Forever Purge is the fifth entry in the popular horror franchise about people trying to survive one night of legal anarchy. Finally, Zola is a comedy-drama, based on a true story, about a waitress who finds herself on a cross-country road trip with a stripper. While its possible that Boss Baby might challenge F9 for #1, expect the flying cars to have a red, white and blue weekend. We'll find out for sure next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment