Ghostbusters: Afterlife takes the weekend box office from Marvel’s Eternals
Ghostbusters: Afterlife opens well as Will Smith's King Richard disappoints
Aux News Ghostbusters
As we reported yesterday, Ghostbusters: Afterlife has been doing better than predicted this weekend. It’s not setting any records, but its prediction-defying $44 million opening was easily enough to put it on the top spot of the weekend’s box office charts. You’re going to ask, so we looked it up: That’s less than what Ghostbusters (2016) made in its opening weekend, but not much less. Save that information for whatever stupid internet fight you want to have.
After that is Marvel’s Eternals, which fell pretty far down to $10 million this weekend. That’s a solid drop, but the movie is still sitting at $135 million after three weeks. Some of these other movies would kill for that kind of money… like, say, Clifford The Big Red Dog, which made only $8 million this weekend and has a total of $33 million.
The next one (or should we say “the next two,” because that’s the thing Will Smith says in the trailer?) is King Richard, which made a not-so-great $5.7 million. The movie is currently available on HBO Max, so there’s a chance that ate into its potential profits, much like with fifth-place finisher Dune. It made $3 million this weekend and is alllmost at $100 million, so it will probably hit that mark, but the box office is notoriously unpredictable these days. (Experts thought Ghostbusters: Afterlife would make under $40 million, but it made slightly over!)
The rest of the top 10 is unremarkable (who wants to hear about Venom: Let There Be Carnage for an eighth week in a row?), but there is something interesting if you go way down to 17th place. That’s where you’ll find Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon, a movie that is not about the theme song to Rescue Me. It made $134,447, which is very little, but it did that on only five screens. That’s a per-screen average of more than $26,000, and we were impressed a month ago when The French Dispatch got $25,000 per screen.
If C’mon C’mon expands as widely as Ghostbusters: Afterlife and maintains that average (which is impossible and will never happen), it will make… still less money than even Eternals earned. Hollywood is brutal. Anyway, this information comes from Box Office Mojo, and you can head over there for more detailed numbers. The full top 10, including Venom: Let There Be Carnage, is below.
- Ghostbusters: Afterlife
- Eternals
- Clifford The Big Red Dog
- King Richard
- Dune
- Venom: Let There Be Carnage
- No Time To Die
- The French Dispatch
- Belfast
- Ron’s Gone Wrong
14 Comments
Maybe someone should fix Kinja’s notification system so that it once again alerts the user when their comment is upvoted.
It took them months to fix the notifications links to send you to person that replied to your post and even then I swear it only works half the time. So I wouldn’t get my hopes up
That’s less than what Ghostbusters (2016) made in its opening weekend, but not much less. It’s really probably only been in the last 20 years that expectations shifted from anticipating diminishing returns in a franchise to expecting a sequel to make more than the original (or the previous installment). I’m not advocating for churning out cash-grab sequels, but Afterlife seems to have gone the right path by making a smaller movie when it’s clear that enthusiasm for Ghostbusters is on the wane.
A movie based on Richard the Lionhearted, Richard II, the doomed king or Richard III, the other doomed king would be great. One based on a sports father/coach/manager – even if his daughters are legends – has a much narrower appeal.
It seems likely that Dune will get a re-release shortly before Part 2 comes out, so it should end up with pretty good numbers.
Yeah I’m really hoping some of my local places or even Fathom does a double feature for it with Part 2. I feel like back-to-back will be an amazing way to experience it.
I mean it’s still open internationally and has likely at least made its budget back, which for serious hard sci-fi of that scale is pretty impressive.Where I am I visited weeks after it released and it was still packed house on a weekday late evening showing.
Yeah, but this movie isn’t blowing the socks off of people. I talked with a woman who just got Disney and said she really liked ‘Jungle Cruise.’ I asked her about ‘Dune,’ and she didn’t have anything good to say. Only that the next one might be good. And I think she said that only because she thought I liked it. Frankly, I thought that I would like ‘Dune’ a LOT more than I did.
I thought I would like ‘Dune’ a LOT more than I actually did. I liked the idea of a grand, visually stunning ‘Dune.’ And regarding the Guild Navigators and the ‘folding of space,’ Denis Villeneuve said that he simply wanted to leave space travel a ‘mystery.’ In other words, ‘I chickened out.’
I guess “simple” is what box office reports need to be, given they come out every week. That said, it does seem a lot of context goes missing.Revenue per screen are a better way to compare a limited release to a wide release — except when the limited release is extremely limited, since accurate statistics depend on a decent sample size and a lack of bias in how the sample is chosen.And for industry insiders, revenue scaled by production/advertising costs would be a better measure of a film’s success (although they probably generate those numbers internally already).
Thank you for that headline image. It saved me the time from the start to that big fat Fuckin Nope.
Wait… Is AV Club admitting that Eternals is doing well??
Yep because of… Marvel!I admit that I haven’t seen it yet and is wary about the lackluster reviews it been getting, so I might be holding off from watching it until its come on Disney+ service. Done the same for Black Widow and Shang-Chi, though I wished that I watch the latter film in theater because it was wholesomely good and have exceed my expectations.I’ll reserves my thoughts on The Eternals once I watch it because… come on, it can’t be anything worst than Iron Man 2 or Thor: The Dark World. Can it?
I thought it was better than both of those movies, but it seems that I’m in the minority. The vitriol I got on reddit for suggesting that it was a decent movie was pretty spectacular. The people who hated Eternals, really hated it, and they will let you know it with multi-paragraph insult-laden rants.