The global box-office is on fire this weekend as several major releases are hitting strong highs and cinemagoers are being offered a considerable amount of choice.
Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” beat expectations – the superhero space opera’s trilogy capper took in $114 million domestically and another $168 million from overseas territories.
That’s a global opening of $282 million – way up on the $250 million estimates going into the weekend. A lot of that is thanks to China where the film made $28 million and is faring better than other recent Marvel fare.
The film also made $25 million in IMAX theaters, the biggest opening across the trilogy and the third-biggest IMAX debut for an MCU movie since “Avengers: Endgame” – behind only the most recent “Doctor Strange” and “Spider-Man” sequels.
The movie will need to have legs to match its predecessors though and, as ‘Quantumania’ showed earlier this year, the real fate of a Marvel film isn’t really determined until its second and third weekends.
“The Super Mario Bros. Movie, in its fifth weekend of release, collected $18.5 million domestically and landed in second place. The highest-grossing movie of the year, it now comfortably sits at $518 million in North America and $1.15 billion worldwide.
It marks the first movie from Illumination to hit the $500 million mark at the domestic box office, and has passed “Toy Story 4” to become the fifth-biggest animated movie of all time.
Then there’s horror sequel “Evil Dead Rise” which crossed the $100 million mark earlier this week and then earned an additional $5.7 million domestically and $9.1 million internationally. Worldwide the film is up to $114.8 million up to this point from a $15 million budget – great work for a film conceived as an HBO Max original streaming movie.
That is easily the biggest money earner of the franchise thus far, and the film is seeing smaller drops than the genre normally gets. It joins “Scream VI” last month as hitting new box-office territory for its respective horror franchise.
The one black spot this weekend was “Love Again,” the Sam Heughan and Priyanka Chopra Jonas-led romantic drama set against a backdrop of Celine Dion’s discography. It took $2.4 million in fifth place, and pulled a near legendarily bad 17% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
