Box office: Ballerina underperforms with the weakest debut of any John Wick sequel or spin-off

The Ana de Armas-starring revenge flick, like last week's Karate Kid: Legends, fell well behind initially optimistic predictions.

Ana de Armas as Eve Macarro in Ballerina.

A few of this week’s highlights:

• Lilo & Stitch held on to the top spot for a third consecutive week, and is now the 5th-highest-grossing “live-action” remake of a Disney cartoon.

• Ballerina—a spin-off of the John Wick franchise that was marketed as From the World of John Wick: Ballerina—had the 2nd-lowest opening of any John Wick movie, ahead of only the original 2014 film.

• Karate Kid: Legends had the steepest second-weekend drop of any Karate Kid movie.

• Thunderbolts*—one of the weaker MCU movies, box-office-wise—finally inched ahead of 2021’s Black Widow, the film that introduced some of its key characters (like Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova and David Harbour’s Red Guardian).

• The Last Rodeo is now the 5th-highest-grossing Angel Studios release.

Ballerina’s soft performance this week was eerily reminiscent of Karate Kid’s soft performance last week. Both films are franchise spin-offs, of a sort, that were projected to open to $35mil+ when they first hit tracking a few weeks before their release dates,¹ but instead opened in the mid- to low $20mils.

The soft debut is less of a problem for Karate Kid, which cost only half of the $90 million that Ballerina reportedly cost to make. But the fact that the tracking was so far off in both cases doesn’t bode well for whatever optimistic predictions we might hear going into the rest of this summer, as the would-be franchise revivals—Jurassic World Rebirth, the latest Superman and Fantastic Four reboots, etc.—get more and more expensive.

And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title: