Battle at the Box Office 4/17/23
The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s utter domination of the global box office continued this weekend with the biggest second weekend of the year and is on track to earn over $1 billion dollar worldwide.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie made a massive $80.1 million in its second weekend, dropping only 45% from last weekend. That says word of mouth is incredibly strong and there are a ton of returning viewers as well as new viewers heading to theaters. It’s also the only kid/family movie of note for at least another month, so it has no competition and all the time in the world to rack up more and more money. Worldwide, the movie has $671.1 million and has probably as of this article posting surpassed China’s Red River Red to become the highest-grossing movie of 2023 worldwide after 12 days of release. It’s on track to easily become the first film of the year to break $1 billion worldwide. It is currently also the #1 movie domestically of the year, easily crushing Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania’s total gross of $212.9 million with over $340 million so far and much more on the way.
Of the weekend’s new releases, The Pope’s Exorcist did the “best” with $9 million, although obviously no match for Super Mario. That domestic opening is between Proof of Life and Broken City for Russell Crowe openings and between Drag Me to Hell and Beloved for exorcism movies. Worldwide, The Pope’s Exorcist has $36.4 million so far.
Renfield opened to third place with $8 million, which is slightly below expectations of around $10 million. That puts it down around It Could Happen to You and Bangkok Dangerous for Nicolas Cage openings and between The Menu and Those Who Wish Me Dead for Nicholas Hoult. It did open higher than last year’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent for Cage and above last year’s Dracula adjacent horror movie, The Invitation. Renfield made $10.2 million worldwide.
John Wick Chapter 4 and Air rounded out the top 5, with the latter dropping around the same as Super Mario at 46% in its second weekend but coming from a much lower opening weekend. Air made another $7.8 million, bringing it to $33.4 million total domestically for two weeks out.
Further down the list, Mafia Momma opened in eighth place with $2 million, which is well below the similarly themed comedy The Family from 2013, which opened at $14 million. For Toni Collette’s openings, that is between Nightmare Alley and Dream Horse. The new movie Nefarious opened in tenth place with $1.3 million in 933 theaters while another new release, Sweetwater, bombed outside the top ten with $350,000 in 1,204, meaning it made only $291 for the entire weekend in each theater.
Speaking of Per Theater, Beau is Afraid, the latest A24 movie from Ari Aster easily took the Per Theater average with $80,099 in four theaters. That is the biggest Per Theater average of the year so far and seems to indicate there’s a lot of interest in the next movie from the man behind Hereditary and Midsommar.
