Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | July 1, 2024
It happened. It took until the end of June but we got our first billion-dollar movie of 2024. Step forward Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out 2, which, in its third week of release, passed the magic number with its worldwide gross. Domestically, its earnings sit at over $469.3 million, which is enough to keep it at the top spot of the box office. Inside Out 2 wasn’t a hotly anticipated movie like, say, Barbie, but it is a Disney movie, a sequel to a popular title, and a well-reviewed family movie. That was enough to get viewers excited. I doubt we’ll get to the end of 2024 and see most of the top ten highest-grossing films with billion-dollar profits, as was commonplace pre-lockdown. But I do think we’ll get more of these hits than we did last year. If nothing else, I believe that Deadpool & Wolverine will provide solid competition for that top spot.
Inside Out 2 did well enough to hold off strong competition from the biggest new release of the weekend: A Quiet Place: Day One. Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn were the stars of this prequel, which received strong reviews and earned a series-best opening weekend gross with $53 million (well ahead of the $40 million that Paramount had initially expected.) Horror is always a safe bet, and this franchise is now a well-oiled machine.
Things weren’t so successful for Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1. The self-funded Western was a long-time passion project for Costner, who has plans for this to be a four-part series (the first two parts were shot back to back and the second movie will be released next month). Reviews were middling. Many critics praised the ambition but felt it was unsatisfying as a whole. If Warner Bros., who are distributing this one, was hoping all the Yellowstone fans would swarm to the theatres, that didn’t come to fruition. Horizon: Part One debuted at number three with only $11 million from 3,334 theatres.
At number five is Kalki 2898 AD, a Telugu-language Indian sci-fi epic. Its cast includes bona fide megastars like Amitabh Bachchan and Deepika Padukone, and it’s reportedly the most expensive Indian film ever made. It’s a big hit back home, and it made a respectable $5,475,000 from only 1,049 theatres. That’s a better per-screen average than Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1.
We got another Indian film in cinemas this weekend: the Punjabi language rom-com Jatt & Juliet 3, about two police officers who head to the UK for a mission. This one didn’t make as much as Kalki 2898 AD but its $1.515 million gross from only 143 locations gave it an impressive per-theatre average.
At number 13 is Blue Lock: Episode Nagi, the movie sequel to the football-themed anime, with $1.05 million from 857 cinemas. And two spots behind that is Daddio, a two-hander drama with Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson, with $440,295.
In further indie release news: The French erotic drama Last Summer grossed $30,300 from three locations; the anthology drama June Zero made $8,142; and the French vampire historical horror The Vourdalak earned $8,115.
This coming week sees the release of animated sequel Despicable Me 4 and the ’80s horror MaXXXine. Birds of a feather!
You can check out the rest of the weekend box office here.
