New Fantastic Beasts just barely beats Sonic 2 at the weekend box office
The new wizard movie knocked Sonic off of the top spot, but he might take it back
Aux News Michael Bay
As we heard just yesterday, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore just opened to the lowest box office total of any movie in J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World franchise. The film’s final-ish total (these things always change a little bit before Monday morning) ended up being only $43 million, only a little higher than last week’s winner, Sonic The Hedgehog 2, which fell nearly 60 percent down to $30 million in its second week. That was enough for the Blue Blur to crack $100 million, and if word of mouth on Dumbledore ends up being as bad as we assume it will be, Sonic 2 could theoretically bounce back. (Let’s say this is a reference to that bouncing thing that Sonic does.)
Third place, again, went to The Lost City, which had made nearly $80 million after four weeks, which is pretty solid. Fourth place went to a little film called Everything Everywhere All At Once, which has continued to grow as it expands its rollout, rising two percent this week to make $6 million. It has only made $17 million after four weeks, but that is absolutely going to go up as more people tell their friends and loved ones how great it is.
Speaking of things that are great: The offenses of Mel Gibson. Here’s what we said when he was cast in the John Wick spin-off show, which we’re still mad about.
Yes, this is the same Mel Gibson who went on an antisemitic tirade after getting pulled over for a DUI 15 years ago, threw a tantrum when he couldn’t get the budget he wanted for Braveheart, was accused of abusing ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorievas, was heard going on another racist tirade on a series of leaked tapes, and once asked Winona Ryder at a party if she was an “oven dodger.”
Father Stu, the movie Gibson made with Mark Walhberg and longtime girlfriend Rosalind Ross, made $5.7 million this Easter weekend. We’ll take it as a win for cinema in general that Everything Everywhere made more money than Father Stu, though maybe everyone’s waiting until after church today to go the problematic churchy movie? If that’s the case, may we recommend a different movie about a man who came to Earth and gave his life as penance for the sins of the world? It’s called Morbius, and it made $4.7 million this weekend (for a total of $65 million after three weeks). Is that what Morbius is about?
Woop woop, that’s the ambulance from Ambulance, driving in to $4 million this weekend. At only $15 million after two weeks, it’s surely going to be one of the least successful films of Michael Bay’s career. After that one The Batman, a movie that will be on HBO Max tomorrow, followed by Indian film K.G.F.: Chapter 2 ($2.8 million in its debut) and—oh, why the hell not?—a second Mark Wahlberg picture in Uncharted. Surely Fantastic Beasts didn’t sell out anywhere, who was going to see Uncharted after nine weeks in theaters? The other notable newbies, Dual and We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, didn’t make much money but had limited rollouts and will probably rise up the charts later.
Here’s the full list, courtesy of Box Office Mojo, which includes barely any editorializing about the stars of these movies.
- Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore
- Sonic The Hedgehog 2
- The Lost City
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
- Father Stu
- Morbius
- Ambulance
- The Batman
- KGF: Chapter 2
- Uncharted
64 Comments
I followed the link and checked out Box Office Mojo for the first time in over two years, it’s still an embarrassingly terrible redesign. I checked the old version every week for years and then they just burned it to the ground.
I like it. They should lean into the retro spreadsheet format more, maybe go with a monospace font to give it a Usenet feel.
It’s not the layout itself, they stripped out SO many features, from what I’ve heard the paid premium version has less functionality than what it used to have for free.
Same. It died overnight to me, and I’d been on it weekly.Somehow I still come here
I found The-Numbers in the wake of Box Office Mojo’s destruction and never looked back
it is pretty funny that imdb bought it and then for a year there wasn’t a box office to report on.
That was an acqui-murder, where you buy an excellent competing website and drown it in the bathtub before it gets big enough to kick your site’s ass.
It also barely beat Sonic in the UK opening weekend for opening weekend which is the mind-blowing thing given that the Sonic IP has extremely limited cultural relevance over here while the Wizarding World IP is so ingrained people literally go out of their way to visit King’s Cross station just to say they’ve been to that half of a trolley bolted to a wall.
It’s become increasingly obvious that the UK wants nothing to do with Harry Potter and have welcomed Sonic and his cadre of pregnant animal friends with open arms.
why pregnant? Also Sonic is pretty damn large in the UK. They had the theme park and hotel for a while. When you look up Sonic merch on Ebay a ton of it comes from the UKNot that I know or anything….
Thanks to Rowling and her bullshit, Sonic is now the less gross of these two franchises.
I don’t know about the UK, but here in America, Wizarding World stuff only tends to do well if it actually has the name “Harry Potter” on it. If it doesn’t, it tends to fall flat.
Sonic’s NOT big in the UK? Huh, I guess my views are skewed when 90% of my exposure to Sonic media is from a Twitter account that sometimes talks about the UK Sonic comic.
Yeah thats not really true , Sonic’s well known and still has big enough recognition factor . On the otherhand outside ‘the internet’ a lot of people either dont know or arent bothered by Rowling’s tweets.
The last time Sonic was “big” in the UK was in the 80s and 90s during the MegaDrive days so while middle-aged and older people will probably have fond memories of it the younger generation won’t have anywhere near that much attachment or potentially even name recognition of it.
Honestly I think Sonic is just way more appealing for families from the trailers than Dumbledore is (the former is bright and full of fun characters while the latter is shot in grayscale and comes off of as drab) and both are basically marketing to that group at this point. I think the franchise (and JK) have lost so much goodwill with HP fans at this point that they don’t have that much advantage there anymore.
It doesn’t help that the last Fantastic Beasts movie was largely forgettable. I couldn’t tell you what happened in it.
This. If the first two Fantastic Beasts movies even held a candle to any of the Harry Potter movies, then this film would have done just as well as the Potter films.Fact is, the first two were overblown messes that lack the cast or heart of the Potter movies.
Nothing in the trailers for these latest batch of “Wizarding World” films suggests it’s for kids. That’s the biggest problem.
I was pretty damned salty when I visited King’s Cross and found out that that’s not where they actually filmed the movie station. I’m still not entirely over it to tbqh.(but you’re damned straight I got my picture with that trolley and it was awesome)
Is Sonic very limited in the UK? My understanding is during the 16 bit era of gaming, Europe(including the UK) was more into the Sega Megadrive(aka the Genesis here) then the Super Nintendo. All the UK based Youtube channels I watch about classic gaming all seem to be Sega super fans. Is it just Sonic specifically that did not connect over there?In the US Sonic is weird. My kids have barely played any Sonic games but both my teenager and my 7 year old know the character and love him.
The Megadrive did do well over here, but the point is that’s a cultural touchstone for people now in their 40s and 50s who are not the intended audience for these Sonic films.Since then Sonic hasn’t exactly been something mainstream. People would probably recognise it but fandom for it is niche which is the point.
Fantastic Beasts barely has any relationship to Harry, Hermoine and Ron, which are who UK fans of Harry Potter generally care about.The first FB film was pretty naff and that came out way before JK views about who she considers to women were known. Heck the second FB was incredibly lacklustre that had the non-wow factor of Johnny Depp, having bored us with a fifth outing as Captain Jack, a second inferior go at Mad Hatter and that dreadful Willy Wonka (not forgetting the doomed Universal Monster Universe thing).I just think UK audiences were mostly just bored of this franchise and had no interested in seeing third try at starting whatever the hell these films were meant to be.
“We’ll take it as a win for cinema in general that Everything Everywhere made more money than Father Stu…”The same Father Stu that this website has been pimping for the last week?
But not Sam. Seems like good autonomy to me.
When I was waiting in line for an advance screening of The Northman an older couple came up to us and the woman told us we should see Father Stu. None of us said anything and then afterward the guy behind me in line continued to extol Michael Parenti.Comparing this Fantastic Beasts movie to the previous one (none of which I’ve seen), it has a worse Metacritic score but a higher Tomatometer rating. It has a higher user/audience score than Grindelwald on both sites. But better than a movie that poorly received is a low bar.
When I was waiting in line for an advance screening of The Northman So was it as awesome as everyone is saying? I can’t wait to see it…
I liked it, but not as much as Eggers’ previous films. I linked to my Pop Culture Weekend review in another comment here.
Soooo. . . is The Northman any good?
Yeah, they kinda buried the lede there.
it was the first sentence
Yes https://thepopculturists.blogspot.com/2022/04/this-weekend-in-pop-culture-april-15-17.html#comment-5829817956
Not OP but saw it months ago. It’s…ok. Some impressive action set pieces, tension, and world building (though there is a religious conflict subtheme that mostly went over my head). But I really couldn’t care less about the main character’s journey and was really rooting against him for the most part. Made it kind of hard to sit through for me.
Fantastic Beasts didn’t sell out anywhere, who was going to see Uncharted —> Fantastic Beasts didn’t sell out anywhere; who was going to see Uncharted
I hope this is the nail in the Fantastic Beasts coffin. The problems with JK and the cast aside, it’s just such middling material. I can’t imagine at this point its a profitable franchise factoring everything in. Let it rest for a while. Maybe JK Rowling will have a George Lucas moment and at least let some new blood write.
Truth. I wanted a FBAWTFT movie, if one was going to happen; something fun, like a magical pastiche of David Attenborough. What I got was…well, that.
Right? Had they actually GONE WITH the “fantastic beasts” concept across multiple films they likely become a huge draw with kids because cute animals in colorful fantasy locations is something they tend to really get behind.Hell, they probably also likely trip and fall in to some Minion-like mascot character that they’re able to market at the same time.I could totally see myself taking my kids to a movie series where each one is Newt and co. venturing to some faraway land where there’s a well known magical creature running amok.Make Newt in to an over-enthusastic animal hunter and give him a human traveling companion because he needs someone versed in HUMAN culture to help him tie his knowledge of magical creatures in to regional myths to figure out where something might be.You could even, if you wanted, have an overarching story by tying in some kind of bad guy magical poacher or something who wants to hunt these creatures down for either a zoo, or a black market, or as pets….god only knows.
yes. I’m not sure who was asking for a super-serious, largely joyless adventure featuring almost exclusively grown-ass adults and olds. FB has no purpose or reason for being beyond “monies.”Harry Potter is something kids and family love. Without the HP name or characters, there clearly isn’t the same level of excitement or investment. I think the idea of Newt having silly adventures over the world was something that could be a fun concept; they chose to instead double-down on prequelizing world-building nobody asked for.
I read that as “Facebook has no purpose or reason for being beyond ‘monies,’” and it still made sense to me.
Exactly. I’m a HP nerd (one of those nerds whose first stop my first time in England was indeed Kings Cross) but at the end of Crimes of Grindelwald, I asked myself who are these movies FOR? The brilliance of the mainline HP series was that they were whimsical fantasies for children with a layer of mystery-box threads along with creative world building (not so much innovating as it is incredibly detailed) that hooked older audiences in both print and screen. But as the initial promise of wizard zoology in these spinoff movies gave way to endless exposition and retcons, I can see kids being VASTLY bored by endless infodumps by adult characters tenuously connected to the ones they loved and only folks with PH.Ds in Wizarding World lore can keep the dizzying amount of bland characters and ridiculous story threads straight.
Ironically, I actually wanted to see what adult wizards actually did after they graduated from Hogwarts. Instead we got a 1920’s, less colorful, less fun version of Doctor Strange.
I’m not sure who was asking for a super-serious, largely joyless adventure featuring almost exclusively grown-ass adults and olds.Star Trek has a similar problem right now IMO, though without the age issue.I say this as someone who continues to watch both Discovery and Picard, and who also consistently rails against the “this isn’t Star Trek” line of argument, but why does it have to be so fucking dour and dire all the time? I hope Strange New Worlds isn’t like that, and the trailers give me hope.I’ve kind of idly wondered if both franchises have fallen victim to the same line of thinking – that in order to be taken seriously, they have to suck all the fun out of it. It’s a terrible choice, IMO, and one that’s been made to the detriment of both franchises.
I just stopped caring the moment they wrapped Paris in black fabric. It was not just that, but that was the final moment of yucky boredom.
The Fantastic Beasts franchise is a Viet Nam-style quagmire. If WB stops making the movies, they lose a core franchise, and risk someone else swooping in and grabbing it away. On top of that, Rowling has little incentive to give up the creative control she’s kept over her creations, and she’s been much more reluctant than Lucas to let anyone else play with her toys.
I don’t actually think it would be possible for someone to swoop in and pick up the franchise as is.JK Rowling retains ownership of the characters, but the films belong to WB. The Fantastic Beast films are copyrighted by WB and no other source material exists since they aren’t the book series.JKR could sell another franchise to another company, but I don’t think she could actually make Fantastic Beasts 4&5. She could reboot it at best assuming WBs rights to the original Fantastic Beasts has lapsed. I do get that they don’t want to ruin the relationship, but at the same time, the ending of this one certainly felt like they were hedging their bets on any more movies happening.
Eh, I’m not absolutely certain that Rowling couldn’t sell the last two Fantastic Beasts films to another studio if WB refused to make them and let their license lapse by not producing a timely film. Even if she couldn’t, I suspect the rights she has would be enough for, say, Disney to produce a series called “Wizarding World: The Greater Good,” which would tell the story of Grindewald and Dumbledore’s teen romance and later conflict, just without Newt and Queenie and Jake Kowalski (and without much of the bad baggage that the Fantastic Beasts name has picked up, which I honestly think a new studio would want to avoid). But the real nightmare for WB isn’t Fantastic Beasts at another studio, it’s that Rowling leaves and then decides at a new studio to do something with the IP that has more commercial appeal than Fantastic Beasts: an actual Harry Potter sequel with the further adventures of Harry, Hermione, and Ron, or maybe a Marauders series about young James and Lilly at Hogwarts in the leadup to the first war with Voldemort. That’s the kind of consequence they might be willing to lose money to avoid.
It’s kind of like Wizard of Oz. The book is in public domain and anyone can do whatever they want. That’s how we got Return to Oz back in the day. But the ruby slippers, the music and other movie specific plot elements all belong to MGM under the movies copyright because they don’t originate in the book.Arguably, JK could even make a Newt Scamander show at another studio. But any character that only appeared in the movie and never appeared in the books would be property of WB as they only exist in the movies.Fantastic Beasts as a narrative book series does not exist. WB is not licensing the characters specific to the movie that did not appear in other HP content. They own them outright.
You’re right—as a general matter, screenplays operate under work-for-hire rules, which is why I mentioned that a prospective Grindewald/Dumbledore series might have to make do without Jacob and Queenie (and maybe even Newt—he’s pretty much just a name on a novelty textbook with no real character in Rowling’s writings. Heck, IIRC, most of the personality in the Fantastic Beasts book is in the margin notes from Harry and his friends.)However, Rowling is someone with historic negotiating leverage, and so it’s not out of question that in her various agreements with WB, she’s negotiated creative control and ownership of character rights, even for characters she created for the screen. So it’s possible she might own those characters. Not that I think they’re terribly valuable, without Dumbledore and Grindewald and Hogwarts and the rest of the stuff that Rowling does own, but she might control those rights anyway.
WB is stupid. I don’t think they are so stupid as to have let her have that much ownership in an IP driven world where they know there is value in them owning the characters.
Regardless, I suspect those characters are fairly poisoned anyhow at this point and another studio is not going to be looking to pick it up. The ending of this movie suggested that they are dialing back the 5 picture deal. I do agree that they would likely still be interested in developing a related franchise. I don’t see them giving JKR as much creative control, though. Yeah, she can go elsewhere. But she having unlimited control did not serve the franchise well.
I didn’t think studios would be as stupid as to give Rowling the kind of control that she (and the author of 50 Shades of Grey, who got a similar level of script and director approval some years later) got while she was writing the Potter books, either, but they wanted the rights to those stories so bad, they were willing to make unprecedented concessions to the writer.It’s just worth noting that those film character rights are things she could’ve clawed back from the studio, and at the time that the agreements were presumably made, Rowling might’ve had even more negotiating power than she did when they initially negotiated the film rights for the Harry Potter series.
They were able to require additional screenwriters after underperformance so they had some fail safe in place to dictate some things, it would seem. But again, I think rights aside, I don’t envision these characters being enticing to another studio. HP characters in general maybe. But not the fantastic beasts crew.
Good fucking Jesus, you just aren’t good at this.
Father Stu was always going to pale next to Father McGrath
“We’ll take it as a win for cinema in general that Everything Everywhere made more money than Father Stu…” Why? Because you think it is a bad movie? That “churchy” movie as you say has a 95 percent positive audience score on RT – so it’s probably all those Christians in church today you were talking about who liked it. Or is it because you don’t like Mel Gibson because of a rant; but it’s okay for you to make the equivalent of an anti-Christian rant? It’s not about poor reviews-if it were you would not have recommended Morbius, which was also poorly reviewed-except that you did it to compare Morbius to Jesus Christ. Funny how no woke writer would dare say something so offensive about Buddha, Mohammad, or any other religious figure, but it’s okay as long as it is Jesus – and on Easter, no less. Go ahead and insult millions of people on their most holy holiday of the year. It’s just Christians. They will forgive you.
Suppose its an act of devine intervention that Father Stu didn’t do Passion of da Christ numbers at the box office on Easter weekend.Hard to say if it did well or not I know Marky Mark said he put “millions and millions” of his own Marky dollars into it and 8 mil aint nothing scoff at but i have a hard time believing Mel’s working for scale and that ad campaign couldn’t have been cheap
God knows buying off this website for a week must have been a pretty penny
Variety said Wahlberg also ran up more costs because production went off schedule and because of music clearances, and then the article mentions that two friends helped him with funding also. In which case, yikes, sorry about your return on investment, friends. I have to imagine this is going to lose money when all is said and done.The ad campaign for this was a full-court press, and yet the actual ads were…blandly unpersuasive. I kept wondering who this movie is for. It’s clearly for the faithful, but it’s also rated R. Even my very Catholic parents shrugged at this one. The trailers gave the whole “plot” away (and I use the term plot loosely because this didn’t seem to have much of one). I was, quite frankly, gobsmacked by the amount of uncritical coverage that AV Club gave to this film, which looked utterly mediocre. At one point a few days ago, the only positive Top Critics reviews for the film on Rotten Tomatoes were from the Catholic World Report (duh), the Boston Globe (double duh), and…AV Club.
i’m morbidly curious to see how it does internationally.
Honestly given how terrible the last two Fantastic Beast movies were, It blow my mind it was even number 1. Who is still watching these movies? Edit: Also holy crap, The Batman is already on HBO Max? Has it been six weeks since release already?
Edit: Also holy crap, The Batman is already on HBO Max? Has it been six weeks since release already?I thought the same thing when I saw it in “Recently Added.”It was like “Wait fuck I thought that just came out?”
Having seeing all three of The Lost City, Sonic 2 and Secrets of Dumbledore, I can say honestly that The Lost City is the best of the three. I know that isn’t say much, but it speaks to the chemistry of Channing Tatum and Sandra Bullock.
I hope this is the end of the Fantastic Beasts series and JK Rowling’s terrible attempts at writing screenplays.As an aside (and without giving spoilers), it would have been easy for Fantastic Beasts to be wrapped up with this movie. It came to a logical conclusion and probably the movie would have been better for it.
Well, if you’re able, let’s see if we can get Everything Everywhere All At Once even more money. Good God, that movie was a blast.
Wizarding World Crippled by $193 Million Worldwide Opening.
Not that I disagree with the spirit – but what’s with the rant against Mel Gibson in the middle of this article? Is he actually cast in one of the films in the top 10? There seems to be zero segue into or out of that paragraph about his offences.
EDIT: Never mind – I found the link. Clearly I was only skim-reading. But I have no idea how you would delete a Kinja comment.