Box Office Weekend – ‘Captain Marvel’ Continues to Fly High

Box Office
Any naysayers suggesting that Captain Marvel would drop huge on its second weekend are in for a disappointment at with this weekend’s box office report, as Marvel’s newest superheroine held a mighty hold for the weekend, flying high above the competition.

 

Captain Marvel held just above a standard 55% drop, which suggests that word-of-mouth on the movie is good even if the movie hasn’t been regarded as one of Marvel’s best, or better than 2017’s Wonder Woman from their Distinguished Competition for that matter. The movie has been a target for trolls looking for a perfect excuse to tear into the movie, but it ultimately proved that they don’t have the level of influence that they thought they had when Solo: A Star Wars Story tanked last year. (On another note: this is probably great news for Lucasfilm, with Star Wars Episode IX set to arrive by year’s end.) Women made up of a greater chunk of the film’s audience compared to the first weekend, and as long as it continues to hold well, a $400M final total domestically and a global total clearing $1B are a near-certainties.

 

As for the other new releases, the only real good news is for the young adult rom-dram Five Feet Apart and the Spanish-language comedy No Manches Frida 2. The former movie, which has a production budget of $9M and $12M spent on promoting and advertising the film, opened above expectations with just above $13M. As long as it has legs, the modestly-budgeted movie should be a modest hit for the studios that worked on it. The latter movie opened to nearly $3.9M, which is a step above the first installment’s $3.6M opening in the United States. Considering how foreign-language films rarely crack the Top Twelve, this is a pretty nice box office accomplishment for the Mexican movie, which has yet to open in its native market.

 

Not-so-good news is in store for Wonder Park and Captive State, both of which are flops. Paramount’s $100M animated film about an amusement park is closing with only $16M in operating revenue. The movie has the distinction of being one of the rare studio releases without a director due to ex-director Dylan Brown’s name being removed by the studio after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct got him fired from the project, and the subsequent directors that took over the film didn’t do enough of the film to get a credit from the DGA, so rules say that the movie had to take the Alan Smithee route. Meanwhile, the latest Focus Features offering wasn’t able to captivate audiences as the $25M-budgeted alien-invasion/social commentary film only started off with a little over $3M for the weekend. The film was not screened for critics and got a tepid C- score from CinemaScore audiences, suggesting that extermination is in store for this movie’s box office.

 

The Top Twelve box office performances for the three-day weekend can be summarized as follows (bolded titles are new releases):

  1. Captain Marvel (Disney/Marvel Studios) – $69.318M Weekend/$266.213M Total; 54.8% Drop.
  2. Wonder Park (Paramount Pictures/Nickelodeon Movies) – $16M Weekend.
  3. Five Feet Apart (Lionsgate Entertainment/CBS Films) – $13.15M Weekend.
  4. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (Universal Pictures/DreamWorks Animation) – $9.345M Weekend/$135.643M Total; 36.4% Drop.
  5. Tyler Perry’s A Madea Family Funeral (Lionsgate Entertainment) – $8.085M Weekend/$59.068M Total; 35.1% Drop.
  6. No Manches Frida 2 (Lionsgate Entertainment/Pantelion Films) – $3.894M Weekend.
  7. Captive State (Universal Pictures/Focus Features) – $3.163M Weekend.
  8. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part (Warner Bros./Warner Animation Group) – $2.135M Weekend/$101.319M Total; 44.8% Drop.
  9. Alita: Battle Angel (20th Century Fox) – $1.9M Weekend/$81.821M Total; 40.9% Drop.
  10. Green Book (Universal Pictures) – $1.277M Weekend/$82.621M Total; 49.2% Drop.
  11. Isn’t It Romantic (Warner Bros./New Line)– $1.265M Weekend/$46.366M Total; 44.1% Drop.
  12. Apollo 11 (Neon) – $1.226M Weekend/$5.54M Total; 2% Drop.

The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, Alita: Battle AngelHow to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, and Captain Marvel are now playing in theaters.