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RDJ Dolittle Premiere Getty.jpg

Box Office Report: Bad Boys Talk to the Animals

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | January 19, 2020 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | January 19, 2020 |


RDJ Dolittle Premiere Getty.jpg

Nobody expects much in the January slump of the domestic box office but there are still some surprises to gleam amid the general sensation of meh. Bad Boys for Life delivered the second-largest Martin Luther King Day four-day weekend with an impressive $68.1 million, according to Box Office Mojo. That’s also a new R-rated high for Sony, so it’s no surprise that a fourth film has already been announced.

News wasn’t so great for Dolittle. Apparently, Universal didn’t suffer enough with Cats in terms of CGI animal flops. Robert Downey Jr. has wanted to make this movie for a long time, a fact that has always fascinated and baffled me, but with a staggering reported budget of $175 million, you kind of knew this film was going to be a write-off once it was bumped to January. It grossed around $30 million over the four-day weekend, which means it actually outperformed the dismal projections everyone had for it, but that doesn’t mean it did well. Seriously, A HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE MILLION DOLLARS! Who was this movie for?!

The other big news of the week came with how the Oscar nominations impacted the box office. Studios immediately put their big movies back in theaters or dramatically expanded their runs to cash in on the increased interest. Parasite, expanded into an extra 500 or so theaters for a solid $1.74 million weekend, while Jojo Rabbit returned to around a thousand theaters for a $1.4 million gross. It’s interesting to see how the nominations impacted certain films but not others. Pain and Glory, for example, saw a 72% increase from the previous week thanks to the nominations for Best International Feature and Antonio Banderas but the nod for Tom Hanks didn’t help A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which saw a loss of 154 theaters. Sony was savvy in getting Once Upon a Time in Hollywood back into theaters — its $310k weekend gross is a 792% increase from the previous week — but that film has also greatly benefitted from a near-constant presence in California theaters since its initial release.

But Kayleigh, I hear you cry, what about Cats? Ah, our old horrifying friends of nightmares past. Well, Tom Hooper’s magnum opus, five weeks into its run, is now only playing in 146 theaters. Ouch. Its domestic gross is under $27 million. Ouch.

This coming week sees the release of Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, Chinese hit action movie Detective Chinatown 3, and The Last Full Measure, which is apparently not about booze.

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: Getty Images.