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Christopher Robin Disney.jpeg

Box Office Report: Mid-Pooh Crisis

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | August 5, 2018 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | August 5, 2018 |


Christopher Robin Disney.jpeg

One wouldn’t necessarily say that the competition was tough for Mission: Impossible - Fallout in its second week of release, but taking on Disney is no mean feat. Tom Cruise hung on like he was clinging to Xenu and Paramount’s golden goose brought in around $35m. That’s 42.8% down from last week, which is pretty solid for a film this big. Internationally, it’s already made about $329m and has a bunch of international territories left to dominate.

Honestly, I’m still not sure who Christopher Robin was for. Did we need another Finding Neverland, especially when Goodbye Christopher Robin got there first? I’m also not sure the best thing pop culture needs right now is another story of how a middle-aged white dude’s life can be improved if he further clings to his childhood loves. That doesn’t work out so good in practice. Anyway, the film actually fell below expectations, opening with $25m. Is this a family movie? If you’re a parent, is this the version of Winnie the Pooh you want your kids to see and not the beautiful 2D animated version that came out a few years but got buried by the studio?

Also new this week was The Spy Who Dumped Me, which opened slightly below expectations with $12.35m on a $40m budget. As expected, audiences have been majority women so this could be a slow burner assuming comedy competition for the rest of the year is slim.

Things weren’t so good for the next new entry at number 8, The Darkest Minds. Amandla Stenberg stars in this adaptation of a dystopian YA series, and it only scraped by $5.8m from over 3000 theatres. Ouch. This just feels like a trend that has long since run its course. Hell, it felt outdated by the time the second Divergent movie was released, and interest in that series died out before they could even finish it. Hopefully Stenberg’s other YA adaptation this year, The Hate U Give, will yield stronger results.

The Dinesh D’Souza ‘documentary’ Death of a Nation opened to $2.3m, which is a new low for the ‘director’. Insert all your hysterical laughter gifs in the comments.

That turd was beaten out by the ever rising Eighth Grade, which added 926 theatres to its run and saw its weekend gross more than double from the previous week. A24, you magnificent bastards. A24 had another new release this weekend in Never Goin’ Back, a Sundance hit that started small but strong with $10k from two theatres.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post, best on the bestselling YA by Emily M. Danforth, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year - the festival’s highest honour - but oddly enough wasn’t picked up by one of the major distributors. Well, I say ‘oddly’ but I think we all know why a story about queer teen sexuality in the context of gay conversion camps wasn’t going to get white dude producers opening up their cheque-books. FilmRise acquired the movie, which opened to stellar reviews, and it made $53k from 2 screens. Rally behind this one if you get the chance.

Disney seem to be giving a final push to two of their blockbusters: Solo: A Star Wars Story got an extra $195k this weekend, which made me very happy. It still hasn’t broken even domestically but shit up I still love this movie dammit! But the record breaker came, of course, from Black Panther, which finally passed $700m domestically. It’s only the third film in American history to pull that off. That it’s even stayed in cinemas for this long is a minor miracle, especially in this day and age.

This coming week sees the release of a comedy called Dog Days - no, me neither - as well as a horror movie about Slender Man, the Jason Statham shark madness of The Meg, and the Cannes award winning return of Spike Lee, BlacKkKlansman.

You can check out the rest of the weekend box office here.

What films did you watch this weekend? Let us know in the comments.



Header Image Source: Disney