Box office: Beetle bumps Barbie with a good news, bad news opening

Also: Sound of Freedom rewards its investors... but maybe not the filmmakers?

Beetle blue replaced Barbie pink atop the box-office charts this week.

Well, I wasn’t planning to track the ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon beyond its first four weeks, but the films keep setting new records, so, let’s stick with ’em, for now…

First, though, let’s note that Barbie was finally knocked from the top spot this week by another Warner release that begins with the letter B, i.e. Blue Beetle, a superhero movie that grossed an estimated $25.4 million in its opening frame.

Blue Beetle’s figures were the sort of so-so numbers that could be spun in positive or negative directions, depending on which way you lean:

• The film fell behind the $28-32 million predictions being made on Thursday… but it was ahead of the $12-17 million predictions being made last month.

• The film cost at least $104 million to produce—some sources say $120 million—so it will probably lose money in theatres… but it was originally supposed to go straight to streaming, so arguably any theatrical revenue is a bonus.

• The film had the worst opening of any DC Extended Universe film that got a proper release (only Wonder Woman 1984, which opened in half the usual number of theatres at the height of the Covid pandemic, did worse)… but it wasn’t a sequel, reboot, or spin-off featuring any established characters, so it had a steeper hill to climb in the first place, and it may have had the best opening of any film that was originally meant to go straight to streaming (I think the best previous opening in that category was for Evil Dead Rise, 2023, $24.5 million).¹

Barbie, for its part, made $21.5 million in its fifth weekend, raising its total North American gross-to-date to $567.3 million, while its release-date partner Oppenheimer added $10.6 million to its coffers for a grand domestic total of $285.2 million.

Notably, both films continue to perform very well when you compare each weekend of their release to the equivalent weekends of their fellow post-Covid films:

This chart does not depict the figures for Weekends 1 or 2.

A few points to note about that chart:

• Barbie is now one of only four films this decade that have grossed over $20 million in their fifth weekends. Of the other three films, only one had a higher total-to-date at this point, but I expect Barbie to fall behind all three eventually.

  • The one film that is way ahead of them all is Spider-Man: No Way Home.

  • The other two films, Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun: Maverick, are both catching up to Barbie fairly quickly.

    • Avatar’s fifth-week total-to-date is, in fact, almost equal to Barbie’s now.

    • Top Gun’s fifth-week total-to-date is behind both Avatar’s and Barbie’s, but that film ultimately soared past Avatar, so it will soar past Barbie, too.

  • All three of the previous films that grossed $20 million or more in their fifth weekends went on to gross at least another $106 million after their fifth weekends, so it’s very possible that Barbie could do that, too.

    • However, two of those films were Christmas releases and had almost no competition in the New Year, while the third was an early summer release that surprised everyone by dominating the whole summer season.

    • Barbie, by comparison, was a relatively late summer release.

    • If Barbie grosses another $106 million, it will end with $673 million, or about $11 million less than Avatar: The Way of Water made.

• Oppenheimer, for its part, previously had the 17th-best first weekend of the post-Covid movies, the 13th-best second weekend, the 10th-best third weekend, and the ninth-best fourth weekend. Now it has the 12th-best fifth weekend.

  • Oppenheimer has now passed Sing, 2016, $270.4 million to become the top-grossing film domestically that was never #1 at the box office.

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