The big story for this weekend will be that when you have a film with a niche audience you don’t need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing to get that audience to show up. Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero easily landed in first place with an estimated $20.1 million, including $3.4 Million in IMAX tickets alone making it their highest grossing anime opening ever. This is a huge win for the animation studio Crunchyroll as it proves they are a studio that truly understands their audience. Of course these Dragon Ball films are generally front loaded with their fans rushing out to see it as soon as possible and generally have steep drop offs the following week with the previous film in the series: Dragon Ball Super: Broly posting a nearly 70% decline in its second weekend. At any rate, it definitely wasn’t as much of a battle for number one as we predicted.
Coming in second place is Beast starring Idris Elba as a father protecting his family against a rogue lion. The film actually had a slightly better hold on Saturday and Sunday than previously expected and should end up with a little over $11.5 Million for the weekend. With no major competition over the next few weeks it will be interesting to see if this decently reviewed film will have legs at the box office. Perhaps next weekends new release Three Thousand Years of Longing will have people clamoring for an Idris Elba double feature?
Losing most of its premium large screens, Bullet Train fell 40% this weekend with an estimated take of $8 Million. That is a fairly decent hold for the quite enjoyable Brad Pitt starring film and shows that word of mouth is fueling this one at the box office. And with no real “popcorn” action movies hitting theaters until Black Adam on October 21, Bullet Train has the opportunity to hit the magical $100 Million mark stateside by the end of its theatrical run.
In fourth place was Top Gun: Maverick posting just a 17% drop from last weekend with an estimated take of $5.85 Million. This has truly been an amazing film to follow. How does a sequel to a film from nearly 40 years ago come out and completely reinvigorate the box office at a time when some people were busy writing the obituary for movie theaters? First and foremost, you make a great movie that demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible. The film now stands as the 9th highest grossing film of all time at the worldwide box office and surpassed Avengers: Infinity War as the 6th highest grossing domestic release ever.
Fifth place sees DC League of Super-Pets taking in $5.7 Million for a running tally of $67.4 Million. With a $90 Million budget, this Dwayne Johnson/ Kevin Hart fronted film will definitely go down as one of the big misses of the summer.
The rest of the top ten is filled in with Thor: Love and Thunder with an estimated $4.031 Million followed by Jordan Peele’s Nope at $3.55 Million, Minions: The Rise of Gru continuing its successful run with $3.52 Million and a running total of just over $350 Million. And you can count Sony’s Where The Crawdads Sing with a $3.15 Million weekend as one of the biggest surprises of the summer with a running domestic total of $77.7 Million. Coming in at the number ten spot is the horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies which added theaters this weekend yet still lost 23% of its audience with a weekend estimate of $2.4 Million showing that the A24 release may not have the strong word of mouth they were hoping for.
Debuting outside of the top ten was Paramount’s prequel film Orphan: First Kill with $1.675 Million which is actually a pretty solid opening when you consider it also premiered day and date on the Paramount+ streaming service.
With no tentpole films hitting theaters until October, will you be venturing to theaters to check out any of the smaller new releases in the meantime? Let us know in the comments.