Box office: Denzel Washington helps drag the summer movie season across the $4 billion line

Also: Barbie is now the year's top movie worldwide, Oppenheimer cracks the Top 100 of all time, and Elemental continues to crawl up the Pixar charts.

Denzel Washington tops the chart again in The Equalizer 3.

The summer movie season ended with a bang this weekend, as a Denzel Washington action sequel scored the second-best Labour Day opening of all time.

The Equalizer 3 opened to an estimated $34.5 million this weekend, which was the best debut of any film since the ‘Barbenheimer’ duo opened six weeks ago. The Equalizer’s estimate grows to $42 million if you include the actual Labour Day holiday today.

Meanwhile, Barbie and Oppenheimer set new milestones for themselves.

Barbie, which has now earned $1.38 billion worldwide, passed The Super Mario Bros. Movie to become the top-grossing film of the year worldwide; while Oppenheimer, which jumped to $851.3 million thanks in part to a strong first week in China, is now right behind them as the third-highest-grossing film of the year worldwide.

Oppenheimer has also now cracked the all-time Top 100 both domestically and globally.

These three films, and others, helped North American movie theatres to achieve the once-seemingly-impossible goal of having a $4 billion summer this year.

From 2007 to 2019, it was pretty standard for movie theatres to sell over $4 billion in tickets every summer (which is defined as the period between the first Friday in May and the first Monday in September, i.e. Labour Day). During that 13-year stretch, there was only one year—2017—that fell short of the $4 billion mark.

But obviously that all changed with Covid. Theatres were largely closed or abandoned in 2020, and audiences only started to get back into the habit of going to movies in 2021 ($1.74 billion over summer) and 2022 ($3.39 billion over summer—over a fifth of which was the $701.3 million earned that summer by Top Gun: Maverick).

This year, theatres finally crossed the $4 billion line, but just barely—the current official tally, according to Box Office Mojo, is $4,028,541,924—and it was late hits like Barbie, Oppenheimer, and, finally, The Equalizer 3 that helped get them there.

It’s interesting to look back and see how this summer’s box-office prospects evolved.

• In late May, Tom Brueggeman at IndieWire—easily one of my favorite box-office analysts—wrote that that month’s movies had underperformed, and June would have to “overperform all expectations for a shot at a $4 billion summer.”

• In the first week of July—after June’s movies underperformed too—Vanity Fair ran an article stating that Hollywood was counting on Tom Cruise to save the day with Mission: Impossible the same way he had saved it with Top Gun: Maverick, but this time he’d have “some help from Barbie and the atomic bomb.”

• David Poland responded to the Vanity Fair article by noting that reaching $4 billion by Labour Day “was already highly unlikely, given where we are right now, even if the 3 films everyone is obsessing on are all major hits.”

• In the end, Barbie and Oppenheimer turned out to be much, much bigger hits than anyone expected… and Mission: Impossible turned out to be just another super-expensive underperformer, at least in North America.

• However, another little film called Sound of Freedom—which opened two days before Vanity Fair ran its piece, and is never mentioned in that piece—picked up a bit of the slack by coming out of nowhere and grossing $182 million, which turned out to be higher than the domestic totals for big-budget franchise pics like The Flash, Indiana Jones, Transformers, Mission: Impossible, and Fast X.

• Amusingly, some rival studios have complained that Sound of Freedom didn’t really do all that well, because of the “pay it forward” program and the allegations on social media that some “sold-out” theatres were mostly empty . . . but would this still be a $4 billion summer without that bump in revenue?¹

Anyway, see below for more thoughts and charts on this week’s top ten.

But first, a few more general points about the current state of ‘Barbenheimer’:

Barbie grossed $10.6 million this weekend, raising its domestic total to $609.5 million, while Oppenheimer grossed $5.5 million and raised its total to $308.6 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 to 4.

A few extra points to note about that chart:

• Barbie is now one of only four films this decade that have grossed over $10 million in their seventh weekends.

• Barbie, which was once well ahead of Avatar: The Way of Water, is now about $11.3 million behind where that film was at this point in its release.

  • Barbie is still ahead of Top Gun: Maverick, but the gap is closing.

    • Top Gun was $60 million behind Barbie three weeks ago and $28 million behind one week ago. Now it’s only about $12.1 million behind.

• Oppenheimer previously had the 17th-best first weekend of the post-Covid era, and its second to sixth weekends ranked between seventh-best and 13th-best. Now it has the eighth-best seventh weekend of the post-Covid era.

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