Battle at the Box Office 11/18

Ford vs Ferrari rolled to an easy win at the box office, making almost more than the rest of the top 5 combined but it was a slow weekend in general.

Ford vs Ferrari took in $31.4 million, which is the third-best opening ever for director James Mangold behind his X-Men films The Wolverine and Logan.  It was the best opening for Matt Damon since Jason Bourne and his third-best opening since 2009 while it was the best opening since Exodus for Christian Bale.  There surprisingly haven’t been a lot of sports biopics around racing but Ford vs Ferrari was well above Ron Howard’s Rush, which made $10 million when it expanded wide in its second weekend.

Midway dropped 52% from last weekend and took second place with another $8.5 million, bringing it to $34.8 million for two weeks out.  Worldwide, it has made $73 million so far.

Charlie’s Angels opened to third place with a pretty terrible $8.3 million, just barely holding off John Cena’s Playing with Fire in its second weekend.  The reboot was nowhere near McG’s early 2000s movies with Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu, and Drew Barrymore, with both of those movies around 4 or 5 times as much in their opening weekends.  It’s also five times less than Power Rangers from 2017, which featured Elizabeth Banks and Naomi Scott in starring roles.  It’s also $10 million less than the much better received and better marketed Atomic Blonde.

As mentioned, Playing with Fire took fourth place and Last Christmas rounded out the top 5 with $6.4 million.

Doctor Sleep plummeted out of the top 5, dropping 57% from last week’s already low opening and falling to sixth place with $6 million.  The movie has made $24.8 million so far.

Joker took eighth place with another $5.3 million but the big story was worldwide as Joker is now officially the first R rated film to make over $1 billion, officially coming in right now at $1.016 billion.  It has outgrossed The Dark Knight and is currently behind Aquaman and The Dark Knight Rises as the third highest-grossing DC movie worldwide.

The Per Theater average went to A24’s Waves, which made $33,583 in each of the 4 theaters it played in.