Jordan Peele’s sci-fi horror thriller, ‘Nope’, took the top spot in theaters over the weekend. Starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer and Steven Yuen ‘Nope’ scored $44.4 million Friday through Sunday. That is a bit below the $50 million plus estimates box office analysts had for the film. However, with a $68 million budget that’s a good start towards profit. The film won’t face much competition in the coming weeks and it is still to open overseas.
It’s not too hard to see what movie will be number one when released. Just look for the one with the most advertising, especially outside the major markets of New York and Los Angeles. The longer the advertising campaign before release, the more likely the film is to succeed.
Case in point, ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ finally falls from first place after it’s expected box office windfall. The 29th Marvel Cinematic Universe installment (not counting multiple tv shows) fell 52% from last weekend. Everybody knows Marvel movies are the most advertised and consistently the top box office performers. Even with huge percentage drops week after week, ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ has been able to overcome bad reviews to bring audiences into theaters.
Doubling down on that case in point.
‘Minions: The Rise of Gru’, the latest installment in the popular animated franchise, naturally had been the number one release over the Independence Day holiday weekend after weeks of advertising saturating the media. The animated flick currently holds third spot with $18 million. Of course, it helps that audiences strongly favor the genre. Could the popularity of animation be contributing to the demise of the Hollywood star system?
In fourth, the mystery based on the novel, ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’, had a reasonable 40% drop in its sophomore weekend. The film had a decent debut in third place the previous weekend and, to continue hammering my point, did not enjoy the same magnitude of a weeks long ad campaign leading into its release.
Unlike (tripling down on my point) ‘Top Gun: Maverick’. Having enjoyed several months of advertising prior to release, the high-flying adventure starring Tom Cruise is the highest grossing film of the year and now the ninth highest grossing film of all time. Even though it’s in fifth on the Weekend Box Office Top 5 now, it has a strong chance of sticking around another week at least.
This theory of advertising leading to box office success isn’t fool proof.
For example, the animated Japanese film ‘Demon Slayer – The Movie: Mugen Train’ debuted in second place back in April of 2021 in U.S. theaters before overtaking the video game adaptation ‘Mortal Kombat’ for number one the following week. ‘Demon Slayer’ was a movie that flew in under the radar due to lack of advertising (at least outside NY and LA). At the time, the pandemic was still affecting releases and ‘Mortal Kombat’ was a simultaneous release to streaming. Regardless of the factors, it’s cases like that which make watching the box office interesting.
While box office results are mostly meaningless to general movie-goers, the main reason for covering it is for the benefit of producers. Savvy producers utilize box office results to gauge what type of movies audiences are more likely to spend money to see.
WEEKEND BOX OFFICE TOP 5 (July 22 – 24, 2022)
- ‘Nope’ – $44.4 million – sci-fi (debut)
- ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ – $22.6 million – fantasy (drop $24 million, 52% down)
- ‘Minions: The Rise of Gru’ – $18 million – animated (drop $8.8 million, 33% down)
- ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ – $10.4 million – mystery (drop $6.9 million, 40% down)
- ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ – $10.3 million – war (drop $2 million, 16% down)
Total for the Weekend Box Office Top 5 comes to $105.7 million. This is a drop of $5.3 million, a decrease of 5%, from last weekend’s total of $111 million.