Box Office Report: Fly Away With Marky Mark

January is almost at an end, and the dump season is still in full effect. Welcome to the genre shlock, the struggling indies, and movies you’re not entirely sure are real.

Such is the case with this past weekend’s top earner at the box office, Flight Risk, starring Marky Mark and directed by Mel Gibson. If you’d told me that this movie was made in an ‘anti-woke’ AI generator or pitched by Ben Shapiro as a way to ‘save Hollywood,’ I’d believe you. Although, in my neck of the woods, the advertising seems to have gone out of its way to avoid noting that Gibson is the director. The newest Trump ambassador to making the movie industry somehow more awful than it already was is not getting the big gigs anymore, funnily enough. This is a rant for another day, so let’s move on.

Flight Risk is typical January fare, and since its competition was non-existent, it made it to number one with only $12 million from 3,161 theatres. That’s a per-cinema average of $3,796, which is overall pretty eh. Lionsgate has been in the toilet lately, and this won’t help. At least it’s not Borderlands?

At number six is Presence, Steven Soderbergh’s haunted house movie where the entire film is shot from the perspective of the ghost. Reviews were respectable, but audience scores were low, and it wasn’t released in theatres until a whole year after its Sundance world premiere, which is seldom a good sign. It earned $3.415 million from 1,750 locations. That’s less than what Moana 2 pulled in on its ninth week of release.

Brave the Dark is a new Angel Studios joint, about a troubled man taken in by his kind drama teacher (Jared Harris?!) It only earned $2,567,062 from 2,230 places. It doesn’t seem to have been Angel Studios’ usual fare, meaning it wasn’t super creepy and right-wing or questionable in its portrayals of non-white people.

The big anime release of the weekend is The Colors Within, a drama about a girl with synesthesia directed by Naoko Yamada. It looks delightful and will probably make me cry like a baby. It brought in $378,022.

In indie release news: the thriller Inheritance grossed $132,222 from 627 theatres; and Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story, a documentary about the iconic Ms. Minnelli, jazz-handed its way to $19,000 from one location.

This coming week sees the release of Valiant One, a war movie involving U.S. soldiers stranded in North Korea, the sci-fi thriller Companion, and Dog Man, based on the Dav Pilkey books.

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