Box office: Red One does well for a movie that was made for streaming, not so well for an action film with a really big budget

Meanwhile, the top movie worldwide this week was Gladiator II, which hasn't even opened in North America yet. (It comes to the US and Canada next week.)

Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans in Red One.

Red One—an action comedy starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans as a security chief and a computer hacker, respectively, who set out to rescue Santa Claus—topped the box office this weekend with an estimated $34.1 million.

That was better than the $20-30 million that some people had predicted. So… does this mean the movie is a hit?

Not by the standards of megabudgeted tentpoles, it doesn’t. Red One reportedly cost as much as $250 million to produce, and it is highly, highly unlikely that the film will make enough in theatres to cover those costs, especially after a start like this. The film also had a rather weak opening for a Dwayne Johnson action movie.

But, Red One was originally made for Prime Video—that’s one of the reasons it cost so much, because the lead actors couldn’t be offered a share of theatrical revenue, thus they had to be paid all their money up-front—and any money the movie makes at the box office now is, arguably, just a bonus for the studio.

Plus, the profile boost from the theatrical release will presumably help the film do even better on Prime Video when it does start streaming.

There are other positive ways to spin the movie’s opening, too:

• It’s arguably one of the three or four best openings of any live-action Dwayne Johnson film that isn’t part of an existing franchise (i.e. it isn’t based on another film, a comic-book character, a TV show, a video game, or a theme park attraction).

• If the estimate holds, it just might be the best opening of any movie this year that wasn’t a sequel or based on a best-selling novel.

• It’s the top non-Marvel, non-Pixar opening ever for co-star Chris Evans.

• It’s also arguably the 2nd-best opening of any film that was originally greenlit for streaming, behind Alien: Romulus (which was greenlit for Hulu but pivoted to theatrical after the cast and/or crew had already been hired).

But to skeptics of the streaming-wars business model exemplified by films like Red One, none of these factors matter. To them, the fact remains: it is simply hard to justify spending so much on a movie that opens to so little, period. (And since we’ve already mentioned Alien: Romulus—that film cost only $80 million to make, it opened to $42 million, and it has now grossed over $350 million worldwide.)

While the debate over Red One rages on, another film swept past it overseas to become the top-grossing movie worldwide this weekend: Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II grossed $87 million in 63 countries to become the top movie on the planet, even without North American theatres. It comes to Canada and the United States next week.

In North America, all movies combined grossed an estimated $74 million this weekend, which makes this the tenth weekend in a row that total domestic revenues fell below $100 million. It is assumed that the drought will end next week, when Wicked (aka Wicked Part I) and Gladiator II come out.

Meanwhile, a few of this week’s other highlights:

• Venom: The Last Dance is now the 7th-highest-grossing live-action film worldwide that was directed by a woman without a male co-director.

• The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is now Dallas Jenkins’ top theatrical release ever.

• Conclave is now the top-grossing Focus Features release of the year.

• Hello, Love, Again is the first Filipino film ever to crack the top ten.

• A Real Pain, an indie release starring and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, is already Eisenberg’s top-grossing non-sequel since 2016’s Café Society.

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