Box office: Bad Boys opens strong in an otherwise weak weekend
Also: IF and The Garfield Movie held on to their family audiences, The Watchers became the latest horror flop, and two Lord of the Rings films cracked the top ten after playing for just one day each.
Once again, no time for a big intro this week.
But there are a few highlights worth noting before we get to the details—and they all tell different stories about the state of the industry right now:
Bad Boys: Ride or Die beat expectations by opening to an estimated $56 million—nearly matching the $62.5 million that the previous film in the series, Bad Boys for Life, opened to just two months before the Covid lockdowns began.
This was a much-needed “return to normal” after most of the other would-be blockbusters released so far this summer had much softer openings than expected.
In second and third place, The Garfield Movie and IF had the strongest holds of the week, dropping only 28.6% and 23.8%, respectively.
This demonstrates once again that there is a strong appetite for family films even though the studios aren’t releasing very many at the moment.
The Watchers—the first film directed by M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter Ishana—flopped with an opening of just $7 million, and still landed in fourth place.
This is the latest in a long line of horror movies that, for whatever reason, have simply failed to find traction this year.
The top ten this week included two—not just one, but two—films from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This, despite the fact that both films are over 20 years old, and each film played for just one day, as Fathom Events specialty screenings.
The fact that two old(er) films could rank so high on the chart despite getting such limited releases is a sign of how weak the competition is right now, once you get past occasional hits like Bad Boys.
Tom Brueggeman at IndieWire puts the weekend as a whole in perspective:
In some utopian future, we can move past the glass half-full/half-empty caveats. That won’t be this weekend, though. The weekend’s total gross of $104 million is the weakest June weekend since the $98 million grossed in 2001. Adjusting to current prices, that is about $195 million today.
And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title:
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