Weekend Box Office: Disney says Brave New World will crack $100 million mark over the 4-day-weekend

It looks like Captain America: Brave New World is posting our first $100 million opener of the year, even if it comes with a bit of an asterisk next to it. While, yes, Disney can boast that Brave New World has opened to $100 million, the caveat is that the opening is based on the box office results for the entire holiday weekend (tomorrow is President’s Day), and that the three-day opening is a comparatively modest $88.5 million (according to Deadline). That’s pretty close to what we predicted earlier this week and a far cry from the usual $100 million plus weekends Marvel was chalking up in their heyday, which seems to have ended.

Think of it this way – two years ago Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania made $120 million over the same President’s Day weekend, and people called it a flop. Brave New World, with all the reshoots that went into it, may actually have a heftier price tag, and the B-minus CinemaScore rating is the worst ever for an official MCU flick (even Eternals and Quantumania managed B-ratings). Thus, expect the box office to plummet in a considerable way next weekend.

That said, this still isn’t a bad opening, especially if you consider how negative the buzz was going into the weekend. While modest by Marvel standards, it’s also not a disaster like The Marvels, proving there’s still an appetite for these movies out there – they might just need to start making them better, which would mean hiring bigger directors (Brave New World’s Julius Onah is an unproven commodity) with perhaps more of a vision. Basically, they need more folks like The Russo Bros or Ryan Coogler. 

In other box office news, Paddington in Peru opened slightly better than the acclaimed Paddington 2, with a $13 million weekend (the movie has already grossed over $100 million overseas). It has some of its thunder stolen by Dog Man, which rebounded after a weaker-than-expected second weekend to come in fourth with $9.7 million, which is only a 30% decline.

Perhaps the biggest news of all is the fact that Heart Eyes actually made more this weekend than it did last weekend, posting a 20% uptick for a $10 million weekend (good enough for third place) and a $22.6 million total. That’s an amazing result, and proof that audiences love this movie. It may well turn into the big sleeper hit of the season. Fifth place was another surprise, with the Chinese blockbuster Ne Zha 2 coming in with $6 million (it’s made over a billion dollars in China). Expect to see more international fare hitting the top 10 in the future. Bollywood, whose distributors have long been releasing movies themselves in North America, pioneered this with their films, which appealed to the Indian diaspora, and China seems to be following suit.

The Ke Huy Quan-led Love Hurts had a softer-than-expected fall in week two, with it only losing 25% of its audience to gross $4.37 million for a $12.9 million total. Mufasa: The Lion King will likely beat it over the four-day holiday, making $4.1 million, with its total to date being $241 million. The sleeper hit One of Them Days added another $2.97 million to its $43.8 million total. It’s been a solid moneymaker for Sony. Sadly, New Line’s Companion seems to be ending its underwhelming box office run, with the movie coming in ninth place with only $1.87 million and a total of $19 million, which is no doubt a big disappointment to the studio considering how hot the reviews were. Sony Classics’ Becoming Led Zeppelin added over 600 screens this weekend and rounded out the top 10 with $1.8 million for a $5.43 million total.

Next weekend should give Captain America: Brave New World another easy win, with only Osgood Perkins’s The Monkey as competition. Even if that movie proves to be a sleeper in line with the director’s last movie, Longlegs, Cap still seems likely to win the weekend, but it’ll be interesting to see if the mixed word-of-mouth gives it a week-to-week decline of over 65%.

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