Box Office Report: Cate Blanchett Steals the Box Office, Our Hearts and Your Girl

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | June 10, 2018 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | June 10, 2018 |

Ocean’s 8 strides into the top spot at the box office this weekend with $41.5m from over 4000 theatres. That’s stronger than early industry expectations, which saw it grossing around $35m. I’m always worried when I talk about the gender-flipped reboot in industry terms because their successes are always doubted by the usual sad little man crowd. A film like this doesn’t just have to be good: It has to be amazing and do double the business of the original and reinvent the genre and cure the common cold. I lost count of the number of times the Ghostbusters reboot was brought up derisively in relation to Ocean’s 8 (because apparently the angry male geek crowd are super protective of a remake of a Rat Pack movie?). The problem with Ghostbusters, which faced way more violent harassment and abuse (most of it aimed at Leslie Jones), was that it cost a lot of money. Ocean’s 8, by comparison, only cost $70m, which is pretty cheap for a film with this kind of star power. The next two weeks will see the film face tough competition, but I expect this one to comfortably make its budget back domestically by next week.

Sitting at number 2 is Solo: A Star Wars Story with $15.1m. *sigh* I still believe in you, Solo.

Debuting at number 4 is Hereditary, the horror hit of Sundance that’s inspired Oscar talk for Toni Collette. With an opening weekend of just over $13m, that’s a record-breaking wide release for A24. The CinemaScore rating of D+ is probably going to be tossed around a lot as proof of something but this film has already made back its budget, won the hearts of critics and gotten everyone to remember how amazing Toni Collette is. What more could you ask for?

With an extra $6.8m to its domestic total, Avengers: Infinity War is about $2m short of hitting $2bn worldwide. Only three films before it have ever pulled that off.

Not doing so well this week is Hotel Artemis, which opened to a disappointing $3.15m from 2407 locations. That’s better than Action Point, but when that’s the best thing you can say about the film, that’s not great!

2018 has been a great year for documentaries at the box office. RBG is still performing strong, and new at number 18 is Won’t You Be My Neighbor? It opened with $470,000 from only 29 locations, which is super impressive. This just seems to be the kind of film people really need right now, and how cool is it that you can say that about a documentary?

This week, we have the comedy Tag, featuring Jeremy Renner’s CGI arm, Race 3 from Indian cinema legend Anil Kapoor, and Pixar’s latest, Incredibles 2.

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

What films did you watch this weekend? What Cate Blanchett suit in Ocean’s 8 was your favourite? No seriously, doesn’t Solo deserve better than this? Are you bored of people trying to claim Hereditary ‘transcends horror’ yet? Answers in the comments.

(Header image of Cate Blanchett coming to steal your wallet courtesy of Getty Images)