US Box Office Made More Than $1 Billion in the Last Month as Delayed Boost Finally Arrives

After the worst March the box office has seen in 30 years, there was a question of what happened to the usual spring bump in business that theaters enjoy. Turns out it came just a month late.

“March was dismal, and that’s being kind. It was down 46% from last year. Then, April was up more than 100%. To have that inconsistency through the first quarter of the year is a big cause for concern, even given the usual ups and downs that the industry has always had,” said Comscore analyst Paul Dergabedian.

Thanks primarily to Warner Bros.’ dynamic duo of “A Minecraft Movie” and “Sinners,” domestic grosses for April reached $873 million, a 220% increase from the anemic $396 million reported for March.

Combine that with the first weekend of May, led by the $76 million opening of Marvel Studios’ “Thunderbolts*,” has pushed North American grosses to more than $1 billion since April 1.

“Minecraft” has been the top grosser with $383 million, continuing the rise of video games at the cinema with plenty of help from the FOMO energy and viral memes of TikTok and other social media platforms. Help has also come from the $179 million of “Sinners,” which only dropped 28% from its second weekend despite no longer being available on Imax screens and is now on course to be the highest domestic grossing original film of the past 15 years.

Now, with “Sinners” holding well and “Thunderbolts” off to a good start, overall totals for the weekend came in at $146 million. That’s up 95% from the first weekend of May last year, when strike-related delays forced Disney to move “Deadpool & Wolverine” from that weekend to mid-July while Universal’s “The Fall Guy” opened to a poor $27.7 million.

This massive gulf between March and April/early May can be partly attributed to quirks in the calendar, namely the later-than-usual arrival of Easter.

“When Easter is in mid-April, as was the case this year, the boost that comes from the holiday break can be a bit later than usual. Easter next year moves back to the first weekend of April, and I think the ebb and flow of the box office in 2026 will reflect that,” said Disney distribution chief Andrew Cripps.

Indeed, part of what has allowed “A Minecraft Movie” to leg out to $400 million domestic is the several weeks of school breaks between the film’s end-of-March release and Easter Sunday on April 20.

The release of that film, along with the rest of March’s slate, likely would have been different if Easter had been earlier, and while that wouldn’t have changed the low performance of films that didn’t resonate with audiences (“Snow White”) or failed to find an effective way to draw interest despite strong reviews (“Black Bag”), the monthly totals for March and April likely would have been closer together.

But the night-and-day turnaround the box office has seen speaks to the next big challenge the film industry faces: preserving audience turnout during the off-peak periods outside of summer and the holidays.

Last year, March was as big as theaters hoped thanks to films like “Dune: Part Two,” “Kung Fu Panda 4” and “Godzilla x Kong,” but a lack of successful films in April led to another slump.

Having weeks-long periods where theaters are desperate for the next blockbuster to save them is the big reason why the box office is in the state that it is in, and finding some way to get more original films to perform like “Sinners” and less like “Black Bag” in the spring and early fall is going to be vital if moviegoing is going to be a 12-month-a-year business.

Of course, as Dergarabedian notes, that’s easier said than done.

“No matter how much we can analyze the data and release patterns and marketing, there’s intangibles you can’t predict. It’s such a non-linear business because every film is different and every audience response is different,” he said. “It’s a bit like herding cats.”

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