Box office: Godzilla x Kong is already the 4th-biggest movie of the year

Meanwhile, this was the first weekend since January without any "faith-based" films in the top ten... but Cabrini and The Chosen had decent holds, just outside the list.

Godzilla and King Kong tower above the Sphinx in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.

The month of March ended the way it began: with a Warner Brothers movie that blew past expectations to score one of the biggest openings of the post-Covid era.

Four weeks ago, the movie in question was Dune: Part Two, the second installment in Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the Frank Herbert sci-fi series. This week, it was Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the fifth film in the so-called “Monsterverse”.

The two films couldn’t be more different in some ways—Dune: Part Two takes itself very seriously as a politically-charged epic, while Godzilla x Kong leans into the silliness of its giant-monsters-smashing-cities-and-famous-landmarks premise—but they do have a few interesting things in common:

• Both films had openings in the $80 million range: Dune: Part Two opened to $82.5 million, while the current estimates say Godzilla x Kong opened to $80 million.

  • Dune: Part Two had the 18th-biggest opening of the post-Covid era, and Godzilla x Kong could have the 20th-biggest opening if its actual grosses this weekend turn out to be just a smidge higher than the estimate.

• Both films are sequels to films that came out in 2021, when Warner Brothers was releasing all of its theatrical films simultaneously on HBO Max—a strategy, known as “Project Popcorn”, that was widely derided as a failure.

  • The two earlier films, Godzilla vs Kong and Dune, earned just over $100 million each in North America, and were the only Warner films to do so that year.

• The two earlier films were each regarded in their own way as films that did more than most to “save theatres” in the second year of the Covid pandemic.

  • And now the sequels are doing their part to “save theatres” again, following the release-date delays caused by the Hollywood strikes of 2023.

It’s particularly interesting to see how the Monsterverse has recovered post-pandemic, and how indeed it may have even received a boost from the pandemic.

The franchise seemed to be fading after the third film, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, grossed only $387.3 million worldwide in 2019. But then the next film, Godzilla vs Kong, came out in March 2021—almost exactly one year after the lockdowns began—and it grossed $470.1 million worldwide despite the fact that theatres were still closed in many parts of the world, and it arguably became a sort of rallying point for people who insisted that audiences were ready to go back to the movies again in a big way.

And now, Godzilla x Kong—which grossed an estimated $194 million worldwide this weekend alone—seems poised to do even better. A lot better.

There are presumably many lessons that one could draw from this, but the thing I keep coming back to is that the Dune and Godzilla franchises rebounded post-2021 and the DC Extended Universe—another Warner Brothers property—did not.

The failure of the DCEU and many other franchises last year—Indiana Jones, Mission: Impossible, The Marvels, etc.—led some people to think that audiences were tiring of sequels and “shared universes”, particularly in light of how well other, more original films like Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Sound of Freedom were doing.

But the success of Dune and Godzilla x Kong suggests that audiences might actually still want sequels and franchises, maybe even “universes”. Perhaps there was just something about those other franchises, and the way they were being handled, that turned audiences off, or at least didn’t attract them to the theatre.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see how Godzilla x Kong does in the weeks to come—whether it has “legs” like Dune or drops real fast like some other big films.

Meanwhile, in other news:

• Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire had the steepest second-weekend slide of any film in that franchise. (So some franchises are still struggling right now…)

• And this was the first weekend since January with no “faith-based” films in the top ten… but Cabrini and The Chosen Season 4 got a bit of an Easter boost.

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