Maxance Vincent
This week was relatively quiet at the movies, which ensured that Hayao Miyazaki‘s The Boy and the Heron would take the top spot as the highest-grossing film of the weekend. The director’s return to cinema after a short retirement saw his first title climb at the top of the weekend box office, signaling a shift in viewing habits in a post-pandemic, post-strike world.
As evident in the $10 million box office cume for The Boy and the Heron and the slight drop Godzilla Minus One saw for its second weekend, alongside an impressive international hold for Animal, the demand for international films on a domestic scale is growing, while Hollywood has had difficulty bringing audiences to cinemas as the same old “content” gets released every week.
That’s not saying there aren’t any domestic successes for sure, but international films don’t usually have this much commercial acclaim at the movies, even with some of the titles releasing on PLF and IMAX. The Boy and the Heron did benefit from strong word-of-mouth and PLF/IMAX release, but Miyazaki has been a staple in evolving the medium (as Guillermo del Toro would put it) of animation forward with films like Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke to name just a few.
On the other hand, live entertainment also hit the top ten, with Waitress: The Musical making an impressive $2.5 million tally through a Fathom Events run in 1,214 theatres. Meanwhile, Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé dropped precipitously, from the top of the box office to the sixth position, with a meager $5 million tally, a 77% drop. While the film received better reviews than Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, it still didn’t generate the same buzz the Taylor Swift film did, even if both fanbases are incredibly vocal online and are two of the biggest out there.
This quiet weekend is leading us to the tail end of the year, and the Christmas movie season will be soon underway with Wonka and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom hitting theatres soon, including many key Awards season players, such as Poor Things, American Fiction, and The Color Purple hitting screens very soon. It’ll be interesting to see how these films play out during the end of the year, while other international entertainment could have an effect on what type of cinema audiences prefer to see during the Holidays.
Here is the full list of the top ten films of the weekend:
- The Boy and the Heron (GKIDS): $10.4M – 2,205 theatres
- The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (Lionsgate): $9.4M (-33.7%) – 3,665 theatres
- Godzilla Minus One (Toho): $8.3M (-26.9%) – 2,540 theatres
- Trolls Band Together (Universal): $6.2M (-20.8%) – 3,451 theatres
- Wish (Disney): $5.3M (-31.2%) – 3,410 theatres
- Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé (Parkwood Entertainment): $5.0M (-77.1%) – 2,542 theatres
- Napoleon (Sony/Apple TV+): $4.2M (-42.3%) – 3,350 theatres
- Waitress: The Musical (Bleecker Street): $2.5M – 1,214 theatres
- Animal (T-Series Films): $2.2M (-65.1%) – 622 theatres
- The Shift (Angel Studios): $2.1M (-49.8%) – 2,415 theatres
Source: Box Office Mojo
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