Box Office Report: Love the Sinner

Over the Easter weekend, it seems that audiences were torn between vampires and this chicken jockey thing that is apparently leading to total destruction across the nation. Fortunately for me, the vampires won. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, starring his muse Michael B. Jordan, stormed to the top spot in its opening weekend with $45.6 million from 3,308 theatres. That’s impressive and heartening for an original movie and a reminder that Coogler is a proper power player even without Marvel’s name above his on a poster.

A Minecraft Movie is still pulling in big numbers. In its first week of release, it brought in an extra $41.3 million. That brings its domestic total to over $344.6 million. It’s still the second highest-grossing film of the year so far, with its $720.8 million intake, but Ne Zha 2, which is still pulling in numbers worldwide, has $2.12 billion. The Chinese animation is about to get an English dub, so I am intrigued to see if it breaks out even further. I see no reason why it couldn’t, although it’s a film where you really have to watch the first one to understand half of what’s going on. But the puke jokes are universal.

Colorful Stage! The Movie: A Miku Who Can’t Sing is an anime movie based on the Vocaloid icon and real author of the Harry Potter books, Hatsune Miku. It made $2.76 million from 800 locations, which was enough to put it at number seven on the charts.

Just behind that is the 20th anniversary re-release of Joe Wright’s adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley. Yes, it’s 20. Time makes fools of us all. I knew that film was popular, but I’m still surprised its anniversary release pulled in $2.7 million from 2,393 theatres. Is it super big on TikTok or something? I do think Matthew Macfadyen is the best Mr. Darcy. Fight me.

At number 12 is The Wedding Banquet, Andrew Ahn’s remake of the Ang Lee film, starring Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, and Bowen Yang. Reviews were solid, but marketing seems to have been soft, so it performed below expectations with only $922,906 from 1,142 theatres.

At number 17 is Sneaks, an animated film about anthropomorphic shoes. It made $240,000 from 1,500 places.

Right behind that is The Ugly Stepsister, a body horror reimagining of the Cinderella story (although, let’s be honest, Cinderella was always a body horror tale. The shoes, guys.) Audiences are super into grotesque tales with a feminist slant these days, so this one grossed $175,000 from 501 theatres.

In limited release news: The A24 fantasy family film The Legend of Ochi brought im $52,514 from only four cinemas; David Cronenberg’s latest, The Shrouds, made $52,100 from three places; and Sod and Stubble, a historical drama about homesteading in the old West, took in $35,554 from 14 locations.

This coming week sees the release of horror Until Dawn and Ben Affleck’s punchy extravaganza The Accountant 2.

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