Box office: Mickey 17 leads another soft weekend

Also: Anora got a post-Oscars bump, and Ne Zha 2 crossed the two-billion-dollar mark worldwide (mostly in China).

Send in the clones: Robert Pattinson meets himself in Mickey 17.

A few of this week’s highlights:

• Mickey 17, the first major-studio film directed by Bong Joon-ho (and the first film he has made since winning three Oscars for 2019’s Parasite), had the best opening weekend of any non-franchise movie starring Robert Pattinson.

• Anora, which won this year’s Oscar for Best Picture last week, returned to the top ten for the first time since mid-November with its 2nd-best weekend ever.

• Mufasa: The Lion King became the first film to stay in the top ten for twelve straight weeks since Migration a year ago.

• Rule Breakers had the lowest opening of any Angel Studios release to date.

• In the Lost Lands had the lowest opening of any wide release directed by Paul W.S. Anderson or starring Milla Jovovich or Dave Bautista.

• Ne Zha 2 is now the 6th-highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, and the first movie ever to gross over $2 billion in a single country (i.e. China).

Overall domestic revenue for the weekend was only $56 million or so, which made this the third weekend so far this year (out of ten) in which total revenues fell below $60 million, and the seventh in which they fell below $80 million.

For comparison’s sake, in the first ten weeks of …

• … 2024, two weekends fell below $60 million, and six fell below $80 million.

• … 2023, one weekend fell below $60 million, and three fell below $80 million.

All figures via Box Office Mojo.

This is a huge change from pre-Covid times. In the first ten weeks of 2020 (before the lockdowns began), not a single weekend fell below $80 million. Not only that, but before Covid, you have to go all the way back to September 21-23, 2001 to find a single weekend—at any time of year—that fell below $60 million.

As a few observers have noted, the next few weeks aren’t likely to get much better, especially in comparison to previous years, as 2023 and 2024 had late-March franchise hits like Kung Fu Panda 4, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Godzilla x Kong, and John Wick: Chapter 4, whereas this month pretty much just has… the live-action remake of Disney’s Snow White (March 21), which has some major question marks hanging over it following years of controversy, reshoots, and box-office tracking that suggests it might not do much better than the live-action version of Dumbo.

As ever, though, we shall see.

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