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Rachel Zegler Getty 1.jpg

Box Office Report: Sha-damn?

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | March 20, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | March 20, 2023 |


Rachel Zegler Getty 1.jpg

The Oscar season is finally over, which means we’re back to normal. Well, ‘normal’, whatever that means in the post-COVID era of the film industry. What we expected was for the blockbusters to return and suck up all the money. That didn’t work out as expected for Marvel with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but that movie’s numbers were solid gold compared to Shazam! Fury of the Gods. The latest DCEU title — or whatever the franchise is now in the Gunn Age — hit theaters to a disastrous opening weekend of only $30.5 million from 4,071 locations.

Reviews were pretty middling but the first film did well and played to far bigger numbers in its opening weekend. It wasn’t a major hit but it made a profit and had strong family appeal in a way that many of its DC cohorts did not. Alas, Warner Bros. Discovery will be feeling the pinch here. It’d be easy to chalk this up to the studio’s obvious disinterest in the DC slate as it stands, with Gunn set to clean it and start anew, but general audiences really don’t pay attention to such stuff. Perhaps the reviews did make an impact here. Quantumania was certainly hurt by mid write-ups and poor word-of-mouth. Not every superhero IP is a safe bet.

Audiences didn’t exactly flock to other movies, since there was no real competition opening this weekend. What we did see at the box office was a post-Oscars boost for A24. The newest Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once took in an extra $1.2 million as the distributors added an extra 1000 cinemas to its run. Their Best Actor victor, The Whale, also benefitted from the Oscars attention and earned a 127% boost from its previous week. Those two movies now have domestic grosses of over $75.5 million and $17.2 million respectively.

Just outside of the top ten, the Lily Tomlin-Jane Fonda dramedy Moving On earned $797,735 from 794 theaters, while Willem Dafoe’s thriller Inside grossed $470,000 from 357 cinemas.

It’s only mid-March so the list of the highest-grossing films of 2023 is pretty meaningless, but it’s still of interest to weirdos like me. The top film is Full River Red, a Chinese historical suspense comedy which has earned over $671 million in its home country alone. Right behind it is the sequel to The Wandering Earth, a sci-fi adventure film based on a story by Cixin Liu, author of The Three Body Problem. At number ten is a terrifying family film from Russia called Cheburashka. It’s based on a Soviet children’s book and has set box office records in the country, already becoming the highest-grossing Russian film of all time. It’s doubtful the movie will receive a major release outside of its home country for obvious reasons.

This coming week sees the release of John Wick 4.

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