Box Office Report: Everything Is Meh

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | February 10, 2019 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | February 10, 2019 |

February isn’t the drought of content that January is for the box office, but so far the numbers haven’t been encouraging for most studios. The big player of the week seriously under-performed and it all went a bit downhill from there. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part was projected to make as much as $55m this week. It brought in $34.4m, so that’s not great. That’s almost half of what the first film did back in 2014, although it’s not the lowest opening weekend for the franchise (that honour goes to The LEGO Ninjago Movie, which made $20.4m in its first weekend). Still, this isn’t great news for what Warner Bros. were hoping would be an animated franchise with legs.

What Men Want didn’t exactly delight critics but it opened about as well as Paramount were expecting, with a $19m opening weekend, landing it at number 2. The budget was reportedly only $20m so job well done all round. These sorts of lower to mid-budget adult-aimed movies may be Paramount’s future, as their big franchises waver at the box office and so many of their properties go to Netflix.

Cold Pursuit opened at number 3 with $10.8m, which is a bit above Lionsgate’s expectations. The opening weekend crowd was, shockingly, majority male. So don’t worry, Liam Neeson will be fine. Hell, was that ever in doubt?

Glass fell from 1 to 5 in its 4th week but is very close to grossing $100m domestically, while Green Book has made $61m domestically and is the only Best Picture nominee in the top 10 this week because oh Christ you know why.

Another new entry, The Prodigy, made just over $6m this weekend from a budget of the same number so yay? Honestly, this one totally slipped past me until like 2 days ago. The title just made me think of the band. Smack My B*tch Up is an all-time classic.

In terms of flops, The Kid Who Would Be King has only made $15.7m domestically in its three weeks of release, Serenity fell from 14 to 30 in its third week of release (a 92.7% drop from last weekend, ouch), and Miss Bala stumbled down 7 places to number 10 in its second week with a total domestic gross of $11.8m so far (budget of $15m).

The Oscar Nominated Short Films of 2019 did pretty solid business with $912k from 265 theatres. See, there is an audience for stuff like this if you make it readily available. At least some people will be able to make fully informed decisions with their predictions this year instead of just picking the one with the fanciest title (which, in fairness, is not that bad a strategy).

This coming week sees the release of rom-com parody Isn’t It Romantic and the latest Blumhouse horror sequel, Happy Death Day 2 U.

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.