Night Swim sinks beneath Wonka‘s boots at the weekend box office
Still: Night Swim, Wonka, and Migration all at least managed to do better than Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom this weekend
Aux News Wonka
2024 has not gotten off to an especially strong start at the box office, Variety reports, with Jason Blum and James Wan’s new horror film Night Swim failing to rise above the head of Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka in its debut, despite the latter film now being in its fourth week in theaters. (And, in an unexpected moment of sympathy with the executives of the Warner Bros. Discovery corporation, we can feel ourselves experiencing some serious frustration that Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom tanked so drastically during the holiday season that we’re now being denied some absolute incredible water/swimming puns. Truly, there is no justice in this world.)
Loose Roald Dahl adaptation Wonka brought in $14.4 million this weekend, giving Warner Bros. a needed win, as the film continues to thrive globally at $465 million overall.. Night Swim, meanwhile, drew in $12 million for Universal—which, given that it only cost about $15 million to make, isn’t all that awful, in terms of “disappointing January horror movie” takes, leastways.
Illumination’s Migration came in third in its third week in theaters, with the Kumail Nanjiani-starring duck comedy not exactly making Super Mario Bros. Movie money for the animation studio; still, its $10 million domestic take (adding up to a $150 million planetary box office performance) doesn’t look too bad against a $70 million budget. As opposed to, yeah, Aquaman 2, which paddled its way to a fourth place finish with roughly $10 million of its own in its third week; the superhero film, as is the way of these things lately, has cleared just $266 million globally against a $200 million budget—a far cry from those heady days of 2018, when the first Aquaman became the first DCEU film to break the $1 billion box office mark.
12 Comments
Night Swim should’ve done some kind of cross-promotional thing with a brand of liquor just so they could use the tagline “Alcohol and Night Swim; it’s a winning combination!”
Night Swim was so damn boring.
Did they consider an R.E.M. cross promo so they could use “Nightswimming”?
Idk how much this matters anymore but Night Swim feels way more like a summer horror movie than a winter one. Think it was a bad release date.
Good point, though the thinking probably went something like, “this movie sucks, so we’ll just dump it in January and save summer for more sure things”
While Aquaman is a huge flop that I have no intention of ever watching, it is still doing much better than The Marvels (that also cost much more) and I don’t remember such sarcasm about it.Wonka is going to enter the top 10 movies of 2023 instead of AntMan 3. Another blow for Disney.
I watched “Aquaman 2: The Secret Of Curly’s Orichalcum” three days ago, and I still don’t know if it was good or not. Yes, the underwaterification of characters’ faces and hair is somehow worse than in the first movie, and there are just too many “peeing in Momoa’s face” jokes, and Guinness need to learn that less is more when it comes to product placement, but the bickering buddy-comedy with Patrick Wilson is thoroughly entertaining, and the pirate city looks great (though Hellboy 2’s troll market is still the high water mark for otherworldly districts).
I saw Aquaman 2 and thought it was a lot of fun. Not good but simple, breezy fun.
I’ll wait for it to come on Max, probably by the end of February. I’m guessing that we will also see The Marvels on D+ soon as well.
If you’re talking about two big, tentpole movies that are expected to appeal to a broad cross-section of moviegoers, it can make some sense to think of them as being in competition with each other. But a movie like Night Swim is really only in competition with its own budget. Horror movies thrive by being counterprogramming to more mainstream movies.The big disappointment here seems to be The Color Purple, which is struggling mightily after a great first weekend. Like Night Swim, I think The Color Purple is more of a niche movie appealing to specific audience, but it wasn’t budgeted like that. It always seemed questionable to assume that you could drop the stuff that made a broad audience embrace The Color Purple the first time (Spielberg, Oprah, Whoopie Goldberg), add music, and expect a hit.
I don’t understand how movies like night swim even get made. Or how someone can watch the trailer and say “wow, I’d like to spend at least $17 to see this in theaters” who is going out to watch these movies and how are they able to do so while technically brain dead? It’s gotta be some kind of tax write off or scam, right? Didn’t we already have that absolutely awful Shyamalan movie about the haunted pool?
the REAL story here is that ‘anyone but you’ has had single digit percentage drops day over day since it came out and actually had a 9% INCREASE over last weekend without expanding theatres. it’s an honest-to-goodness word-of-mouth romantic comedy sleeper hit. it’s performing like movies in the 70s used to.