Box Office Report for the Week of April 7

Hot Monkey Season is in full swing, with Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and Monkey Man taking the number one and two spots at the box office this weekend. While the MonsterVerse title experienced a 60% drop, it still remained the top earner this weekend, with a $30 million tally, adding to an impressive global haul of $361 million, now the second highest-grossing blockbusters of the year.

While it received great reviews, Dev Patel‘s Monkey Man has difficulty finding its footing, with a $10 million tally on its opening weekend. Though it won’t be a complete loss for Universal, as the film was initially slated to release on Netflix until it was quietly dropped by the streamer, for fears the movie is too politically charged for Indian audiences. Jordan Peele saved the movie and shopped it to Universal, who gave it a fully-fledged theatrical release. The studio spent over $10 million to release the film, so the movie has already made its money back. The question remains whether it will leg out, as the next few weeks will be barren before we lead up to the summer movie season.

This weekend also saw Disney’s first theatrical release of the year, with The First Omen. The good news about the film is that it has almost made its money back, with a global $17.2 million tally on a $30 million budget. The bad news is that the film couldn’t even reach the top three in the domestic market, with Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire making at least $1 million more than The First Omen, which saw its domestic opening tally at $8.3 million.

It also doesn’t help that Immaculate, an eerily similar horror movie, was released in theatres two weeks ago and still attracts audiences. Both movies center on the subject of demonic possessions and pregnancies (a twist on the Immaculate Conception), though one is more closely connected to pre-existing IP than the other. If you remove the tie-in at the end of The First Omen, you get two similar films in tone and thematic underpinnings.

From a consuming perspective, an audience member will not see both; they will choose what they think is the most interesting. After seeing Immaculate, which had one of the most inventive marketing campaigns for a horror movie in a long time, audiences did not want to see the same film again. Credit where credit is due: the marketing campaign for The First Omen was pretty great, but measured up to Immaculate, it was clear that the Sydney Sweeney-starring horror would be the winner. Time will tell how much The First Omen will do in its second weekend (the positive reviews are more encouraging on the matter than Immaculate‘s, which was far more divisive than The First Omen), but it’ll be interesting to see which one is more commercially successful by the time their run ends.

Here is the full list of the top ten films of the weekend:

1. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (Warner Bros): $31.7M (-60.4%) – 3,948 theatres
2. Monkey Man (Universal): $10.1M – 3,029 theatres
3. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (Sony): $9.0M (-42.2%) – 3,835 theatres
4. The First Omen (Disney): $8.3M – 3,375 theatres
5. Kung Fu Panda 4 (Universal): $7.8M (-24.1%) – 3,398 theatres
6. Dune: Part Two (Warner Bros): $7.2M (-36.5%) – 2,836 theatres
7. Someone Like You (Fathom Events): $3.0M – 1,802 theatres
8. Wicked Little Letters (Sony): $1.6M (+1931.5%) – 1,002 theatres
9. Arthur the King (Lionsgate): $1.5M (-38.0%) – 1,704 theatres
10. Immaculate (NEON): $1.4M (-56.8%) – 1,706 theatres

Source: Comscore