Weekend box office proves people like it when Godzilla and King Kong are friends
Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, is set to easily win the Easter weekend box office over a second week of Ghostbusters
Aux News Godzilla
This week’s box office returns are poised to answer a question only rarely considered by the world of movie theater economics: Do people prefer it when a big lizard and an over-sized gorilla hit each other, or when they hang out and act like actual friends? By all early accounts, friendship is winning out—with Adam Wingard’s new MonsterVerse movie Godzilla X Kong set to out-perform his more combative predecessor, Godzilla Vs. Kong, in its opening weekend in theaters.
With $37 million in previews and opening night returns (per Variety), Wingard’s latest kaiju flick is on track to handily beat expectations, which had it set at a fairly shrug-worthy $50 million for the Easter weekend as a whole. Instead, it’s likely to land somewhere in the neighborhood of $67 million, which puts it at the second-best MonsterVerse opening to date, trailing only behind Gareth Edwards’ franchise-launching 2014 Godzilla film. Godzilla Vs. Kong, meanwhile, opened at a bit less than half that—although it’s worth remembering that that was deep in the lockdowns circa 2021, when the film was also simultaneously released on the service we then knew as HBO Max, breaking a young David Zaslav’s heart in the process.
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that Godzilla X Kong (subtitled The New Empire, because it’s 2024, and you’re not shit if you don’t have “Empire” in your subtitle) is set to beat out the second week of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. (See?) That film is expected to bring in roughly $15 million this weekend, bringing its domestic total up to $73 million. That’ll bring both movies in ahead of the imperially minded Dune: Part Two, although Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi spectacular remains the highest earning film of the year overall by a ridiculously comfortable margin, currently sitting at nearly $250 million in its domestic take. (That being said, the MonsterVerse movies tend to do way better in foreign markets than they do domestically, so the year-end totals might be a lot closer than initially indicated.)
11 Comments
I’m never going to be happy about someone losing their job, but it’s striking how much more informative and less irritating this box office article is than what we’re used to.
It is still unnecessarily snarky, just maybe 12% less so than it used to be.
Did barsani het banned???
He got laid off.
Hahahahaha hellll yessss. Damn shame he wasn’t fired years ago for gross incompetence.
Yes, he announced on Twitter that he had been let go as part of the company’s move to Paste.
Except that it doesn’t actually list the top ten, and in fact only mentions three movies. Aside from that though, it is indeed a better read than previous rundowns.
Yeah, I’d like to see the full top ten. It gives a better picture of what movies are succeeding, because there are lots of movies that honestly are never going to seize the top spot. Love Lies Bleeding, for example, was never going to be a blockbuster (and wasn’t seemingly aspiring to be) but it’s interesting see if it’s finding an audience.Still, you at least get real analysis in this article of what this means from a box office perspective One thing that always stood out about Barsanti’s writing to me was how laden it was with weird grievances, which sort of infected all his analysis. So this week we would have gotten an article about whether the vile, idiotic David Zazlav would defeat the fans of the vile, sexist Ghostbusters franchise, and the whole tone would be bitter and negative, and no where in there would you actually get a sense of how the movies were performing and why.
Elsewhere “Late Night With the Devil” is holding strong and doing comparatively modest but nonetheless very profitable business and IFC is ecstatic.
Between this, Monkey Man, Sasquatch Sunset, Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes, & Wicked Part 1, 2024 is going to be a banger year for simian cinema!
https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2024/03/31/titans-multiply-in-godzilla-x-kong-the-new-empire/
That Ghostbusters drop is concerning. I don’t think it will make $100M domestically.