Box office: Novocaine tops the slowest weekend in over a year

Also: Steven Soderbergh's Black Bag, Looney Tunes' The Day the Earth Blew Up, and Pinnacle Peak's The Last Supper all had modest openings, too.

Jack Quaid on the run in Novocaine.

A few of this week’s highlights:

• Novocaine, an action comedy starring Jack Quaid as a guy who can’t feel pain, had the lowest gross of any #1 movie since February 2024.

• Black Bag, the second Steven Soderbergh film to come out this year, had one of the lowest first weekends in wide release of any Soderbergh film—but it still made more money in one weekend than his other film this year has made in its entire theatrical run.

• The Day the Earth Blew Up had the lowest opening, by far, of any original Looney Tunes movie.

• The Last Supper—the first of at least three Jesus movies coming out between now and Easter—landed well behind the openings for most of The Chosen’s theatrical releases but ahead of the openings for films like Journey to Bethlehem.

• Ne Zha 2 passed Star Wars: The Force Awakens to become the 5th-highest-grossing movie of all time worldwide, behind three James Cameron movies and Avengers: Endgame.

Overall domestic revenue for the weekend was only $51 million or so, which made this the third weekend in a row (and the fourth so far this year) that total revenues fell below $60 million. To put that in context:

• Before the Covid pandemic came to North America in 2020, there hadn’t been a single domestic theatrical weekend below $60 million since September 21-23, 2001.

• The last time three weekends in a row fell below $60 million was in September 2022, beginning with the traditionally slow Labour Day weekend.

• There were only two weekends below $60 million in 2023, and only two weekends below $60 million in 2024. (To repeat: there have been four weekends below $60 million already in 2025.)

• This was the 2nd-lowest weekend in all of 2023-2025, ahead of only February 9-11, 2024, when there was a big pause in theatrical releases because of the 2023 strikes. Total revenues that weekend were only $37 million.

Weekend-by-weekend theatrical revenue for the first 11 weeks of 2023-2025.

It is assumed that the live-action remake of Disney’s Snow White will give theatres a much-needed boost next week. But whether that film will be a leggy hit like Mufasa: The Lion King or a front-loaded underperformer like Captain America: Brave New World—just to cite the last two super-expensive Disney movies—remains to be seen.

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