The Pope’s Exorcist fails to scoot past Super Mario Bros. at the weekend box office
It's Super Mario's weekend once again at the domestic box office
Aux News Pope
As we noted earlier this weekend, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is making all of the money (or “coins”), approaching $350 million domestic after just two weeks as it climbs (as if on a hidden vine to a secret area in the clouds) up the ranks of the most successful animated films of all time. It made $87 million this weekend, a not-super-bad 40 percent drop from last week, and even with almost a dozen new movies on the charts this week (mostly in limited rollouts), nothing even came remotely close to taking Mario’s top spot.
Second place went to The Pope’s Exorcist, which made $9 million and will most likely just be remembered as the movie that gave us that funny/awesome photo of star Russell Crowe on a scooter. After that is John Wick: Chapter 4 with nearly $8 million, settling in with $160 million after four weeks, followed by Renfield and Air with $7.7 million each (Air is at $33 million in its second week).
The second five has Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves with $7 million (it’s almost at $75 million after three weeks), newcomer Mafia Mamma with $2 million, oldcomer Scream VI with $1.4 million ($106 million after six weeks), newcomer Nefarious made $1.3 (it’s a faith-based horror movie, so… be warned), and the similarly churchy His Only Son made $518,000 (though it’s historical churchy, not “cameo from Glen Beck modern right-wing churchy” like Nefarious is). Further down the list, opening in 13th place with $320,000, is Ari Aster’s film Twitter-destroying Beau Is Afraid, which got a whopping $80,000 per-screen average. Super Mario, for comparison, had an average of $19,000. (How To Blow Up A Pipeline had an even better average, but it’s only playing on two screens so that seems unfair.)
The full top 10 list, courtesy of Box Office Mojo, is below.
- The Super Mario Bros. Movie
- The Pope’s Exorcist
- John Wick: Chapter 4
- Renfield
- Air
- Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
- Mafia Mamma
- Scream VI
- Nefarious
- His Only Son
42 Comments
How To Blow Up A Pipeline is playing in 142 theatres.https://www.the-numbers.com/weekend-box-office-chartBox Office Mojo screwed up.
yeah i saw it yesterday it’s playing in more than 2 theatres in toronto alone. also it fucking ruuuuules.
At this point is Dungeons & Dragons considered a success or not? Obviously it was never going to do Avatar or Mario numbers.
Nothing on the ’Return of the King’ reshowing?
It is, unfortunately, a flop.
No, it isn’t a flop. It’s going to end up in the vicinity of $250 mil worldwide and will do well on streaming/VOD/cable. It’s almost certainly presold in foreign TV markets for a considerable sum. It’ll make money. What it isn’t is a franchise-starter, probably needed to make twice what it’s going to in theaters for that, so if the D&D IP is used theatrically again it won’t have a movie star in the lead and it won’t be as high-budgeted as Honor Among Thieves.
It’ll be profitable but not the kind of profitable that Hollywood is looking for these days. But that’s not a flop. There’s an entire film industry between “hit” and “flop.”
Plenty of people have seen it and liked it, but it doesn’t look likely to earn back its budget, so it won’t be considered successful.
Not the success they were looking for (new franchise starter) but it was a modest success. I imagine it’ll play realllllllly well on streaming/VOD/cable so the IP will likely continue, just with a lower budget than Honor Among Thieves got (which was $150 million) and/or in a different form (streaming series on Paramount Plus seems like a decent option since they could make 10 hours of content for the same price as the two they got out of the movie).
It’s definitely not a success financially. It has made $157.1m gross on a $150m budget after its first three weekends, it doesn’t have a chance to break even IMO.It’s a bit baffling that it ever got that big of a budget to begin with.
The budget makes sense. It’s a hugely popular brand among nerds with a decades-long legacy, which has had trouble with film adaptations but all it needs to become a franchise is one big hit.In other words, it’s exactly in the position Marvel was in before 2008. I can see how the studio thought it was worth taking a chance on.Honestly I think what doomed the movie was a really dumb release date. It came out just five days before Mario, meaning it was a gaming franchise in direct competition with another, MUCH more popular gaming franchise. D&D met its studio projections for its opening weekend, and usually when a movie does that it’s on track to be a hit. But the following week Mario came along and destroyed D&D’s numbers, dooming it in the long term.
I know the movie met industry expectations for its first weekend at the box office, it’s a little hard to believe that the studio only expected it to do $37.2m domestically on a $150m budget though. That weekend was never as good as it was heralded to be as the movie needed great legs to be profitable even after winning the weekend.And what other weekend would you have slotted this into? This year is jam-packed with big movies and it’d be hard to find any week where a movie has no competition from a major franchise for two to three weeks.
In 2008, Marvel already had two very successful cinematic franchises (Spider-Man and X-Men) and the flipping comic book pages logo in front of every Marvel adaptation made Marvel a household name even among non-nerds. I feel like I often see revisionist history that acts like the comic book movie boom didn’t start until the MCU debuted, but it really began well before then.Anyway, I agree the problem with Honor Among Thieves was the release date, but I still think D&D fans tend to overestimate its popularity amongst the general public.
popularity is also a funny metric. it’s popular enough that i think the average person knows what d&d is, but the average person also doesn’t give a shit.
I know I don’t.I was pretty old before I understood what D&D is because no one introduced it to me as a kid, and I don’t understand what the appeal of a movie adaptation even is. Instead of making your own adventure with your friends, you’re watching famous people act out a generic fantasy adventure. Woo.(I feel similarly about video game adaptations. When I was a kid, I wanted video game adaptations of all my favorite action/adventure movies so I could play them. Why would I want to watch overpaid actors do an elaborate Let’s Play instead of just playing the game myself?)
eh i mean, arguably most movies are famous people acting out a generic fantasy adventure. i liked the movie at lot for what it’s worth, you should check it out when it’s freely available in your home.
Spider-Man and X-Men were already popular franchises before they had movies. They didn’t sell themselves on the Marvel brand, they were sold because non-comic readers already knew and loved the characters; Spidey from decades of pop culture appearances and the X-Men from their very popular 90’s cartoon show. No one cared (and most probably didn’t even know) that Spidey and the X-Men came from the same comic book universe.
And that’s the difference; Marvel itself was not yet the main draw. What Iron Man and other early MCU movies did was turn the setting into the franchise, allowing them to build multiple sub-franchises within it. This was what Hasbro and Paramount were planning to do with Dungeons and Dragons. There was a TV spinoff and various movies based on other D&D setting planned. Unlikely that those will happen now (the TV show has been in development for a year so we’ll probably get that at least) but the plan was to make a cinematic universe, and you can’t do that on a small budget.
I would argue that yes, Spider-Man and X-Men were established properties, but the early-to-mid-2000’s movies established Marvel. They all used the iconic animated company logo that firmly established the Marvel brand in moviegoers’ minds, which led to all of the pre-MCU Marvel movies – The Punisher, Ang Lee’s Hulk, Daredevil, Elektra, and Tim Story’s Fantastic Four. For example, something like Ghost Rider definitely got greenlit because it was a Marvel property, not because he was already a popular character in the mainstream. So as far as branding, how that brand is perceived in the general public, and how big-budget adaptations of the brand were already being made, I think Marvel was in a much better place in 2008 than Dungeons & Dragons is today. IMO the more apt comparison is Marvel in 1998, before Blade was released.
It’s a bomb. At $150 million plus marketing and the current box office, it will only be a success if it does spectacular numbers on digital rentals and streaming. The studio-distributor really screwed it over, sticking it on the weekend before the Mario movie. Even if it had had a huge opening weekend, it still would have been smothered the next weekend. They also spent too much on it, although I hate saying it because by all accounts they went to some real pains to do good integration of practical and special effects – that’s why it honestly looks really good.
I think a sensible approach is that because box office numbers are public, but overseas licensing and streaming numbers are not, we the public have no idea. There have been countless movies in the past 5 years that did mediocre box office numbers and then were big hits on streaming, but that didn’t stop randos like us from yelling about how movie X was obviously a big failure because it didn’t make a billion dollars in theaters.
With a budget of ~150m, a flop (which makes me sad).
Good thing ‘The Pope’s Exorcist’ didn’t beat Mario, otherwise, by the AV Club’s logic, we’d soon be drowning in Pope’s exorcist movies, each worse than the last.
2 Papal 2 Furious
I might actually see that movie.
Rosemary’s Baby: Tokyo Drift
You know the 5 part harness car seat in that movie will be killer
The Young Pope’s Exorcist.
Tbf with the internation collections the Pope’s exorcist is already making profit and has recouped it’s budget.
In an effort to piggyback off the success of the Mario movie, the producers of How to Blowup a Pipeline are renaming their film How to Blowup a Warp Pipe.
Well obviously
In the Battle of Fake Italian accents, the Worst Chris comes on top.
Pope’s Exorcist might already be a success, since it only cost $18 million to make and has made nearly double that with the international gross counted in. The second five has Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves with $7 million (it’s almost at $75 million after three weeks), This movie really got done dirty. What the hell were they thinking, sticking it the weekend before the Mario movie? They should have either given it a late January premiere, or if that wasn’t possible delay it until August when things slow down but you can still get a summer movie audience. It’s a real shame, considering how fun it was.
They bet on Chris Pine being a bigger draw than Chris Pratt. A foolish mistake even though I like Pine more. In terms of Chris popularity it’s Chris Evans, Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth and finally Chris Pine. Pine just isn’t the draw he once was and he doesn’t try to be anyway.
Nah, Mario is one of the biggest media franchises of all time. It would have been a hit no matter who voiced the title character.
All the more reason they should have let Charles Martinet voice him…
Given how anemic Mario was as a character, and how relatively little dialogue he had, the fact that it was Chris Pratt was pretty clearly a “his name will draw people in even though any halfway decent non-famous voice actor could give the exact same performance.”
I actually did go see Nefarious, I was unaware that it was a Christian horror movie, but when I saw it was from something called Believe Films, well, I figured it out. It was actually pretty good, yes, there was some insulting stuff thrown at progressives and here and there, but considering the director was the God’s Not Dead guy, it didn’t go as hard on that stuff as I would have imagined. I will say Sean Patrick Flanery gave an amazing performance, it’s worth seeing just for that.
No wonder. I wouldn’t watch #2-10 even for free.
Battle of the Cinematic Eyetie Caricatures.
Box Office Mojo claims Shazam 2 has left theaters, and doesn’t have it in the top 30 for the weekend. But I saw it Sunday, and there were 10-15 other people in there, too, and other showings that day. So… what gives?(also, for what it’s worth, I thought it was pretty good! Certainly better than what I’d been led to believe)
Yeah, Shazam 2 was kind of bloated and obvious, for lack of a better word, but it was also fun and well-structured. I think people underestimate (and often don’t understand) the value of a properly-structured narrative, where plot beats and character moments are properly set up and paid off.
We saw Renfield yesterday. The A.V. Club review (despite its usual dollop of wtf) was mainly on-target: it’s energetic enough to overcome the stupid stuff, and yeah, the CGI blood splatters were distractingly bad. Like, I normally don’t care if CGI is mediocre, but the blood in this movie looked like giant dollops of barbecue sauce. It didn’t help that every single person appeared to contain about 50,000 gallons of blood and would erupt in huge gouts of blood from, like, a bump on the head.