TAGGED AS: Box Office, movies, news
Super Bowl weekend has always cut into weekend moviegoing. Since 1990 there have been 35 iterations of the big game, with the best weekend coming in 2009 when Liam Neeson was throat-punching his way into our hearts with Taken. The top 10 that weekend made $95.9 million. Since the pandemic, the box office during this weekend has not surpassed $50 million, but it has seen some remarkable consistency, with three of the last four years seeing a top 10 total between $46.3 and $47.8 million. This weekend joined that bunch, but depending on the final estimates, it may be poised to surpass its peers. As of now, with no less than four new releases making it into the top 10, it reached $49.6 million.
Sam Raimi’s Send Help led for a second straight weekend. Rachel McAdams vs. Dylan O’Brien on a deserted island grossed an estimated $10 million to bring its 10-day total to $35.8 million. By next weekend, it will become Raimi’s top-grossing movie that doesn’t involve Marvel or Oz. Its current total is around where The Maze Runner: Death Cure (with O’Brien) was at this point ($40.03 million), but with a similar sophomore weekend ($10.47 million). That suggests Send Help is headed between $50-$60 million, and its $17.9 million international haul so far could send this into the success category for 20th Century Studios and Disney.
Kevin James is back in theaters in the flesh with his first wide release since 2015. Courtesy of Angel Studios, the comedy Solo Mio, with James as a dumped fiancé going through with his honeymoon in Rome, opened to $7.2 million. That’s a long way from the Paul Blart and Sandler days. On the other hand, even with a handful of reviews, the film is registering as the highest score of Kevin James’ big screen career in either live-action or animated. Until the 78% (as of this writing) of Solo Mio, the Fresh entries on James’ resume included only Monster House (75%), Becky (72%), Hitch (68%), Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (62%), and this year’s Guns Up (61%).
Markiplier’s adaptation of video game Iron Lung fell back to third this weekend, but every dollar is a victory at this point. Varying reports have had the budget between $2-4 million. With $6 million this weekend the independently made and distributed production has already grossed over $31 million. That is more than the adaptations of Doom ($28.2 million), Super Mario Bros. ($20.9 million), Borderlands ($15.4 million) and Wing Commander ($11.5 million) among others. If the film is being taken out of theaters by next weekend it has just four days to gross less than $2 million to pass Street Fighter with Jean Claude Van Damme on the video game chart.
Despite 40+ years of celebration as one of the most beloved comedies of all-time, Bleecker Street was unable to open Rob Reiner’s Spinal Tap II to better than $1.61 million. Even sadder was that it was still the company’s 12th-best opener ever. This weekend it took a K-Pop group to give them their second best ever. The near two-and-a-half hour Stray Kids: The dominATE Experience opened to $5.5 million, trailing only Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky for the company’s best opening of $7.6 million. Globally it has made $19 million.
Last year we had Radu Jude’s Dracula. This year we have Luc Besson’s Dracula. Since the days of La Femme Nikita (88%), The Professional (72%) and The Fifth Element (71%), the filmmaker has not had much success with critics, save for 2014’s Lucy with Scarlett Johansson (67%), the film that was also his biggest financial success with over $458 million grossed worldwide. He followed that up with mega-loser Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Anna (2019), Dogman (2023), and June and John, which was shot during COVID lockdown and released overseas last year. This weekend’s roughly $52 million production of Dracula with Caleb Landry Jones as the bloodsucker and Christoph Waltz as Van Helsing opened to $4.5 million. On the bright side, that is Vertical Entertainment’s best opening to date, besting We Bury the Dead’s $2.5 million from just five weeks ago, and it has already surpassed Gotti ($4.34 million) as their highest-grossing theatrical release.
Renny Harlin’s reboot/reimagining/continuation of The Strangers series has not exactly put up record numbers. But those numbers have nevertheless made the investment worth it for Lionsgate. Chapters 1 & 2 reportedly cost a combined $17 million and grossed over $69 million globally. That’s the only math that matters to the studio. Now comes The Strangers: Chapter 3, opening to $3.5 million, lower than the $11.8 million and $5.8 million of the first two chapters, which went on to gross just over $35 million and $15 million, respectively. The final chapter will likely come in under $10 million, so while this particular film may come up in the red, the trilogy is already very much in the black.
How are the all-timers doing? Well we can confidently say now that Zootopia 2 will become the top-grossing domestic film released in 2025. The film added $4 million to its total of $414.5 million. That puts it now about $9 million away from dethroning A Minecraft Movie. It now also has the sixth-highest overseas total ever with $1.388 million and is over $1.8 billion total. Zootopia 2 just missed having its 11th-straight week in the top five. Avatar: The Way of Water was the last film to do that. Cameron’s follow-up Avatar: Fire and Ash spent just seven weeks in the top five, and this weekend fell to eighth with $3.5 million and a total of $391.5 million. It continues to climb the worldwide chart as it nestled into 18th place all time with $1.439 billion and is now looking to pass Barbie ($1.447 billion), Frozen II ($1.453 billion), and Top Gun: Maverick ($1.495 billion).
Black Bear’s Shelter will be their first film to get over $10 million, though it is still a low number even for Jason Statham. After $2.4 million this weekend, it is still going to need another $3+ million just to pass Crank: High Voltage, the action star’s third-lowest grossing star vehicle. Other sub-$20 million efforts have included The Expendables 4 ($16.7 million), Safe ($17.1 million), and Parker ($17.6 million). Shelter ultimately will be included on that list. The film has made $26.8 million globally, currently Statham’s second-lowest global total ahead of only In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale ($13.09 million).
Closing out the top ten is Brett Ratner’s documentary, Melania, which fell over 66% down to $2.3 million. It has now grossed a total of $13.3 million. That would be an incredible number for a documentary if it didn’t cost $75 million in talent fees and marketing. Meanwhile, Amazon’s Mercy went from first place to out of the top 10 in three weeks, earning just $1.9 million and grossing a total of $22.7 million. That’s not great when you realize it cost $60 million, and it is just below $50 million globally. $100 million plus marketing for two movies that have not even grossed $40 million: the math does not lie.
Charlie XCX’s pseudo-mockumentary about her Brat Summer tour, The Moment, had an incredible $427,960 start last weekend in just four theaters. A24 expanded the film this weekend into 581 theaters, where it grossed $1.69 million. The numbers have some similarity with their release of Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid, which began with an $80,099 per-theater average only to expand to 965 theaters in weekend two to a $2,759 PTA. The Moment went from $106,985 to $2,907. So far, it has grossed $2.2 million and will go even wider next week. A24 also put out Harry Lighton’s Pillion with Alexander Skarsgård in four theaters, where it grossed $241,000. Not too shabby either, but lets hear it for Marty Supreme, which has now become the studio’s highest global success ever with over $147 million. $93.2 million is on the North American side after $1.3 million this weekend.
Wrapping things up, we have IFC’s release of horror film Whistle, which grossed an estimated $720,000. Neon got the fourth of its International Feature Oscar nominees, Sirat, out in four theaters this weekend. It grossed an estimated $136,000. Paul Feig’s The Housemaid has now surpassed $350 million worldwide, putting it among the top 20 global releases of 2025. It is Feig’s highest-grossing hit across the world. Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy, and 2026’s Ghostbusters all made between $228-289 million worldwide.
Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” (yes, in quotation marks) with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi opens next week and is poised to put up the biggest numbers of the year so far. Apparently, GOAT is also tracking to have the best opening for an original animated film since Pixar’s 2020 release of Onward, which was upended by a pandemic being declared the following week. Chris Hemsworth, Halle Berry, and Mark Ruffalo headline Crime 101, an adaptation of the Don Winslow novel. Then there is also Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die with Sam Rockwell as a time traveler trying to stop the rise of AI. Also look out for early contender as the funniest film of the year with Neon’s release of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.
Erik Childress can be heard each week evaluating box office on Business First AM with Angela Miles and his Movie Madness Podcast. [box office figures via Box Office Mojo]
Thumbnail image by ©Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
