Box office: Haunted Mansion is eerily empty, while Barbie, Oppenheimer stay strong

Last week's record-setting blockbusters had much better holds than usual for films of their size.

The feet may be flat, but Barbie is winning the box-office race.

Disney stumbled at the box office yet again this week, while “Barbenheimer” proved it has legs—in the strong-ticket-sales-week-after-week sense, that is.

Haunted Mansion, Disney’s second attempt to turn one of its spooky theme-park attractions into a big-screen movie, grossed a mere $24.2 million this weekend. That’s almost exactly what the first attempt, starring Eddie Murphy during his family-movie phase (Mulan, Shrek, Daddy Day Care, etc.), opened to 20 years ago—and that film cost only $90 million to produce, whereas the new film cost $150 million.

It’s the latest in a series of box-office black eyes for Disney, following the poor if not awful performances of high-priced films like Elemental, Indiana Jones, and Ant-Man & the Wasp. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is pretty much the only film they’ve released this year that seems to have turned a profit while it was in theatres.

While Haunted Mansion languished in third place, the big story this week is that Barbie and Oppenheimer, the two phenomenally successful and very different films that led last week’s box office, did it again this week, by grossing the kind of numbers in their second weekend that would have been called successful in their first weekend.

Barbie, the PG-13 feminist comedy, grossed an estimated $93 million this week, while Oppenheimer, the R-rated atomic-age biopic, grossed an estimated $46.2 million.

Both numbers represented a drop of between 42% and 44% from their debuts last week—an unusually strong hold for films that have had openings as big as theirs.

Of the 17 other films that have opened to $75 million or more this decade, only three have dropped less than 50% in their second weekends:

• The Super Mario Bros. Movie (-36.9%), currently the top-grossing film of 2023 both domestically and overseas;

• Top Gun: Maverick (-28.9%), the top-grossing film of 2022 in North America;

• and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (-47.6%).

All the films that have had first weekends of $75 million or more so far this decade, ranked from their biggest second weekends to the smallest.

IndieWire’s Tom Brueggeman—one of the best box-office observers in the business—notes that this was also the first weekend in almost five years in which six films grossed over $10 million. (Aside from Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Haunted Mansion, the list this week included Sound of Freedom, Mission: Impossible, and Talk to Me.)

Brueggeman also notes that only one of this week’s $10 million movies comes from an existing movie franchise, whereas “the last time we saw six titles over $10 million was over Thanksgiving 2018, when four of those movies were franchises.” Hmmm.¹

Anyway, lurking behind all this good news is the more sobering reality that we may be entering another relative drought at the box office… and that’s before we take into account the fact that some studios have already started bumping films to next year because of the actors’ strike. (Kraven the Hunter, a Marvel movie that was going to come out October 6, got bumped last week to August 30, 2024—almost a year later.)

So, we’ll see how the rest of the year pans out.

In the meantime, a few more stats re: this week’s top ten, title by title: