Box Office Week: Aquaman takes #1 with $72.1M with over $450M worldwide so far. Mary Poppins Returns underperforms at #2 with $22.2M. Bumblebee also underwhelms at #3 with $21M. Second Act makes little impact at #7 with $6.5M. Welcome to Marwen totally bombs at #9 with $2.3M.
| Rank | Title | Domestic Gross (Weekend) | Worldwide Gross (Cume) | Week # | Percentage Change | Budget |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aquaman | $67,400,000 | $482,800,000 | 1 | N/A | $200M |
| 2 | Mary Poppins Returns | $22,235,000 | $51,349,671 | 1 | N/A | $130M |
| 3 | Bumblebee | $21,000,000 | $52,100,000 | 1 | N/A | $135M |
| 4 | Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse | $16,700,000 | $129,600,063 | 2 | -52.8% | $90M |
| 5 | The Mule | $9,950,000 | $35,653,465 | 2 | -43.2% | $5M |
Notable Box Office Stories
- Aquaman - Can't stop MY MAN (how dare Aquaman not have a single "my man!" by the way, 0/10 worst film) as Aquaman came to the US shores after two weeks of international release to a very good $67.4M domestic. That's the 9th best December opening of all time but is notably the worst opening for a film in the DCEU by $30M (previous 'winner' Justice League opened to $93.8M). Now it should be noted that this was always a bit expected as outside of the insanity of the Star Wars movies typically films in December open low and then just multiply like crazy, especially with the big boost of Christmas Eve today and Christmas Day tomorrow, which are traditionally two of the biggest film going days of every year. Let's not forget Avatar opened around the same range in December and ended up topping the all time domestic list. Or last year's Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, which turned a $36M opening into a $400M domestic run. If you can capture the spot of being the big blockbuster of the season then you are set and with this opening I think Aquaman has stood out from the pack and could easily play like those other two films. International sales alone have been massive, mostly lead by China where the film has grossed $232.8M so far, the 7th best US release in the country. This was a film meant to appeal to a wide global market and has definitely captured something worldwide and now we see if that same foothold will happen here.
- Mary Poppins Returns - MORE LIKE MARY FLOPPINS! Look I give myself one dumb pun a year and I couldn't resist. Much to the surprise of many (including some likely very grumpy Disney execs this Christmas) the incredible long in production sequel Mary Poppins Returns opened to a very underwhelming #2 with $22.2M and $31M for its five-day long release. That's pretty rough, especially for Disney's big splashy end of year release that cost an astonishing $130M to produce. Now as someone who will always be rightly mocked for savaging a December musical opening low that ended up grossing...let me check....8 billion dollars?! I will never again declare a December musical DOA. But I will say Poppins better get to charming quick. The good: it has that sweet sweet Christmas Eve and Day run that is mostly driven by families and nostalgia may win over dad exploring his confusing feelings for Momoa's pecs. Then it could be enough WOM generated by that day to get it to a great run. The bad: frankly I think the songs have just not live up to their potential and there has not been the bleed into the mainstream like the songs from Greatest Showman and Frozen. The best marketing both those films ever did was put up music videos of their best songs which exploded in popularity. Poppins has tried the same but its big song "Where the Lost Things Go" hasn't even cracked 250K on YouTube.
- Mary Poppins Returns (cont.) - Not to mention the film got a surprising A- on Cinemascore which could mean a more tepid response than expected which goes along with the tepid film reviews. And there's the bigger problem of does the public even want this? Star Wars and Jurassic Park sequels feel like more urgent because people may want to see a continuation of a story they once loved or ya know, dinosaurs. But if the appeal of Poppins Returns is "see the character you love again with new songs" and the songs aren't great and the reviews are meh then maybe you say "hey fam, instead of spending $100 on a movie night let's all just break out the old DVD and enjoy it at home, where there's booze." So yes Poppins could become the 9th highest GDP of the year but I just feel it is very very hard to do. But it could happen. Please don't embarrass me again December musicals. I'm so sorry I doubted you once.
- Bumblebee - Poor Bumblebee. Getting the best reviews of the Transformers franchise by a country mile and the thanks it gets from you people? A #3 debut with $21M, the worst debut of the franchise by over $100M. Rude! For real this film had a tough road, being a strange prequel/spinoff of the already faltering Transformers series which in 5 years dropped $500M worldwide from entry 4 to entry 5. However things looked up with Bumblebee surprising probably everyone when it scored very good critical reviews including a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, the first film in the franchise to be certified fresh on the site. The film scored an A- on Cinemascore which should help give it more legs than its predecessors but this might be the film to most suffer from competition. Obviously there's Aquaman which seems to have stepped over the others as the blockbuster of the December release. And then there's the fact that this isn't even the best reviewed franchise film of the season as Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse was just awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature just for the Spider-Ham parts. It will be very tough for Bumblebee to stand out in that crowd, especially with the clear ill-will that has grown in the general public to this franchise and the fact that this is not the promised Bee Movie sequel we demanded!
- Second Act - Counter programming! I love it! This week's attempt to cut between the big blockbusters is the new queen of counter-programming, J Lo who's career keeps churning with her latest attempt to revive that mostly dead rom com genre with Second Act which opened to a pretty low #7 with $6.5M domestic. The film by venerable weird institution STX who are now my new favorite punching bag now that Global Road is no more. The film notably moved up a month after fantastic test screenings but apparently the general public didn't get the message as the film debuted low and got a B+ on Cinemascore. One thing that may hurt the longtail of the film is a shockingly bizarre twist (seriously google it) that many critics harped on and could disinterest audiences. Ultimately this film just feels skippable unless it captures some kind of weird cultural moment like Crazy Rich Asians did, which I doubt.
- Welcome to Marwen - To quote a very good friend of mine /u/GetFreeCash, "America is going to shit right now but at least the common people know Welcome to Marwen isn't worth spending money on." Poor Bobby Z, just can't catch a break for his weird live action documentary retellings as Welcome to Marwen / The Women of Marwen / Marwen / 2Marwen2Col opened (and probably closed) this week to a devastatingly terrible #9 with $2.3M. The film, which is an adaptation of the acclaimed documentary Marwencol, was an odd attempt to fictionalize something seemingly simple, a man who gets brain damage after a hate crime assault uses realistic photographs of action figures as a form of therapy. However Zemeckis, never one to let a chance to do some insane CGI visual gimmick, decided to animate the dolls with slightly realistic human faces. The results were clearly an audience that went "huh" or "why" and that killer gumbo/ammo joke could do nothing to save it. The few audiences and critics that did see it didn't like it either savaging it with a 25% on RT and a B- on Cinemascore. That makes two for two for Zemeckis making flop live action films based on documentaries with his previous film The Walk also flopping. I can't wait for his inevitable weird CGI face replacement version of Three Identical Strangers that makes $1,573 opening weekend.
- Oscar Movie Round-Up - A bit of a quiet week for Oscar films as most are just seeing how they hold during the Christmas break, but there were a few expansions. First up is Mary Queen of Scots, which added 729 theaters for a total of almost 800. The film managed to sneak just into the top ten at #10 with $2.2M, a solid score especially for a film that's been struggling for nominations. It scored about the same as The Favourite which also jumped to almost 800 theaters and made roughly the same with $2M. However that's actually a 20% drop from last weekend so the film seems to have already run through its principal audience. It will be interesting to see how these two films fair on Christmas Eve and Day. Finally, Cold War, the acclaimed Polish film which is one of the many frontrunner in foreign language, opened this weekend in 3 theaters to a solid $55,727, a per theater average of $18,576. The film is the follow-up from director Paweł Pawlikowski to his massively acclaimed 2014 film Ida which won the foreign language Oscar that year. It will probably have a pretty small run unless it gets into the coveted five spots of the foreign language nominations which are often very unpredictable and will have a tough time competing with another super acclaimed foreign language film also in black and white called
Spider-Man NoirRoma.
Films Reddit Wants to Follow
This is a segment where we keep a weekly tally of currently showing films that aren't in the Top 5 that fellow redditors want updates on. If you'd like me to add a film to this chart, make a comment in this thread.
| Title | Domestic Gross (Weekly) | Domestic Gross (Cume) | Worldwide Gross (Cume) | Budget | Week # |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Rich Asians | $21,595 | $174,016,156 | $238,016,156 | $30M | 19 |
| Venom | $195,867 | $213,030,843 | $854,509,348 | $100M | 12 |
| A Star is Born (2018) | $1,583,653 | $200,051,727 | $382,051,727 | $36M | 12 |
| First Man | $30,500 | $44,860,180 | $100,560,180 | $59M | 11 |
| Bohemian Rhapsody | $6,533,598 | $184,686,798 | $666,931,577 | $52M | 8 |
| Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald | $5,589,303 | $154,452,713 | $611,452,713 | $200M | 6 |
Notable Film Closings
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My Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/Les_Vampires/
Submitted December 24, 2018 at 10:19PM by mi-16evil http://bit.ly/2rUqlDY
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