Weekend Box Office Report: ‘The Boss Baby’ Just Cannot Be Stopped
Welcome to the calm before the storm. With a handful of blockbuster movies already released, and more on the way, the second weekend in April was a relatively quiet affair, with a few old favorites dominating the weekend yet again and a few new releases grabbing whatever box office they could before things get fast and furious at your local multiplex. Let’s take a look at the projected grosses through Sunday afternoon.
Film | Weekend | Per Screen | ||
1 | The Boss Baby | $26,300,000 (-47.6%) | $6,869 | $89,373,318 |
2 | Beauty and the Beast | $25,022,000 (-44.9%) | $6,304 | $432,316,034 |
3 | Smurfs: The Lost Village | $14,015,000 | $3,882 | $14,015,000 |
4 | Going in Style | $12,500,000 | $4,084 | $12,500,000 |
5 | Ghost in the Shell | $7,350,000 (-60.6%) | $2,137 | $31,573,450 |
6 | Power Rangers | $6,215,200 (-56.3%) | $2,087 | $75,111,442 |
7 | Kong: Skull Island | $5,825,000 (-32.2%) | $2,116 | $156,554,724 |
8 | Logan | $4,050,000 (-33.7%) | $2,078 | $218,057,408 |
9 | Get Out | $4,020,485 (-29%) | $2,554 | $162,853,135 |
10 | The Case for Christ | $3,900,000 | $3,322 | $3,900,000 |
With no major blockbusters opening this past weekend, the top two spots went to the highest-grossing movies of the last month. The Boss Baby led the pack with $26 million in it second weekend, keeping pace with previous DreamWorks Animation movies like Kung Fu Panda 2 and keeping the dream of a $150+ million domestic gross alive and well. Meanwhile, Beauty and the Beast finished with $25 million in second place for a total of $432 million at the box office. Beauty and the Beast has done better through its first four weeks than the next highest-grossing Disney movies (Avengers: Age of Ultron and Finding Dory), suggesting that Disney might have to reshuffle its Top 5 before all is said and done.
But enough about those two powerhouses. The big winner among the new releases this week was Smurfs: The Lost Village, which opened in third place with just over $14 million. This puts it in the same ballpark as The Smurfs 2 — which opened to $17 million — but that movie wasn’t competing for family dollars with movies like Beauty and the Beast and The Boss Baby. A smaller budget bodes well for Smurfs: The Lost Village to break even at the box office, but with better family options on the market, it’s hard to see these see particularly long legs on these Smurfs.
Zach Braff's Going in Style, another new release this weekend, finished in fourth place with $12 million. That represents about half of the movie’s budget, which should ensure that Going in Style is a modest success when all is said and done; unlike Smurfs: The Lost Village, there aren’t a lot of movies competing for the box office dollars of older moviegoers, and Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman certainly still have their fans out there. It won’t be a smash success, but then again, not every movie needs to be.
Picking up the final spot in the Top 10 is our final new release, The Case for Christ, with $3.9 million, a somewhat disappointing number for the faith-based film. While The Case for Christ likely doesn’t need to make a lot of money to earn its budget back, a weak field of play and a major religious holiday (Palm Sunday) likely had distributor Pure Flix thinking they had another God’s Not Dead on their hands. Expect somewhere between $10 and $15 million for this one when all is said and done, which is probably still enough to finance the next half-dozen Pure Flix films.
As for the rest of the movies? Ghost in the Shell is now a bonafide disaster for Paramount Pictures, only grossing $7.3 million in its second weekend and finishing well behind a movie about octogenarian bank robbers. We learned this week that the studio was prepared to take a $60 million bath on this movie; songs will be sung about Paramount’s great mistake of 2017. Both Power Rangers and Kong: Skull Island continued to hang around, earning $6.2 and $5.8 million respectively in sixth and seventh place. Power Rangers has now broken even at the worldwide box office, but it might not be enough to turn one movie into a major franchise. Kong: Skull Island, despite its hefty price tag, has earned over $500 million worldwide and should offer executives no such tough decisions.
Rounding out the list is Logan and Get Out, which each grossed a little over $4 million in eighth and ninth place, respectively. Although the stakes for each film were very different going into theaters, they both had something to prove and have done well to get to this point. If this is the last week for either film on the Top 10, then they’ve opened the doors for future superhero and horror movies that are as thoughtful as they are mature.