The pandemic is still going on, there’s no hope on the horizon, and the movie theater industry is going to be destroyed if things don’t change, but also it’s not necessarily safe to go to a movie theater and the government has no interest in helping anyone but Donald Trump and his rotten family, so the only way movie theaters are making any money is by people going to movies even though doing so could put themselves and others at risk. Got all that? Good, because now that it’s out of the way, let’s talk about the box office without the grim specter of the pandemic and the grimmer specter of Donald Trump hanging over us like a couple of… you know, grim specters.
Last week’s surprise box office winner, the Liam Neeson-starring Honest Thief, is still on top, having added $2.3 million to its haul for a total of $7.4 million. That’s pretty good for mid-pandem—oops, almost mentioned it there. That total is a hair higher than the champ it knocked out, Robert De Niro’s The War With Grandpa, which made $1.8 million this past weekend (landing it in second place) and pushing it to a total of $9.7 million. In third place we have Tenet, a movie some of us have heard about more than the Christopher Nolan movies we’ve actually seen, which made a scant $1.3 million for a significantly larger (yet still not very good, all things considered) total of $52 million. After that is the first of two new releases, The Empty Man, which made $1.2 million.
Rounding out the top five, we have the benevolent people at Walt Disney Studios asking people to leave the virus-free comfort of their homes to see The Nightmare Before Christmas and Hocus Pocus, which are both on Disney+ and yet made $577,000 and $530,000 this weekend (respectively). Disney also took sixth place with a re-release of Monsters, Inc., because god forbid Mickey Mouse miss out on milking people for an additional $494,000 in the middle of a damn pandemic.
The only other items of particular interested are number eight, After We Collided, which is apparently a teen-romance sequel to a teen-romance movie called After that we definitely remember, and The New Mutants, which landed at number 10 and is now on the verge of drifting out of the range where we feel obligated to talk about it in these write-ups. Sorry, New Mutants. We’ll remember the good week when you made some money before Tenet showed up.
For more detailed analysis of this weekend’s box office numbers, head over to Box Office Mojo.
4 Comments
PLEASE JUST RELEASE TENET FOR HOME VIEWING. GIVE ME THAT GOOD JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON FOR MY HOME VIEWING PLEASURE RESEARCH.
I’ll never get the fascination with “going to the movies”. Yes, I was a film addict when growing up, but I also had the advantage of growing up in a town where I was three blocks away from an historic theatre, and five miles away from a theatre that did a classic movie series every summer. Times change. Technology changes. I don’t have a great sound system but I’m perfectly fine with watching (almost) current films on my laptop.
Agreed. The only film I considered going this year was precisely Tenet just because of the experience you get on an IMAX screen. That’s a movie made for theaters. Everything else? I’m more than fine with my 11′ macbook lol
Tenet was gonna be my go-to film this summer, but so much for that. I honestly don’t care for IMAX because it gave me a headache the two times I saw films with it. To each their own. What I’m now disappointed with is the next James Bond film being pushed back, which is fine, but dammit I really like Craig as Bond and his films have been good if not great as Bond. Skyfall was a default film for me when it was parked on Netflix for a couple years.