Box Office Report for the Week of August 18

It’s another big week for Disney, as not only is Deadpool & Wolverine still making tons of bank at this point in time, but Alien: Romulus is now at the top of the box office, something we usually saw during the Bob Iger era. Funnily enough, Romulus was once slated to be relegated exclusively for Hulu, just like 2022’s Prey. Bet Disney ever regretted even making that decision since the movie has already made its money back with a $42 million domestic opening and a $108.2 million global tally.

Meanwhile, as more and more studios begin to embrace the true power of theatrical distribution, Apple has chosen to dial back its large-scale theatrical releases, with Wolfs now only getting a limited window before releasing on Apple TV+ the following week. With George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the lead and an IMAX release planned, it would’ve been one of their most successful films to date, but it looks like they’re now having cold feet on the viability of their approach. Here’s hoping they course-correct soon because Amazon will now be the only streamer to benefit from releasing their films with an actual theatrical window.

On another note, the 15th-anniversary re-release of Coraline made more money than Borderlands’ second weekend, with an imposing $8.3 million tally in 1,603 theatres. It’s worth mentioning that the film made $16 million in its opening weekend in 2009, so doing half of that for an anniversary re-release screening is pretty impressive. Borderlands, however, is totally dead and could very end up being the biggest box office bomb in the history of cinema, surpassing the likes of Battlefield Earth, John Carter, and The Adventures of Pluto Nash.

So we have a record-breaking box office for the summer, one with the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time, and another with the potential lowest-grossing movie of all time. It’s so bad that Lionsgate has announced it’ll release the film on VOD on August 30! BIG yikes for everyone involved, but we have at least seen that, in some shape or form, theatrical is here to stay, no matter what the naysayers want you to believe.

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

1. Alien: Romulus (Disney): $42.0M – 3,885 theatres
2. Deadpool & Wolverine (Disney): $29.0M (-46%) – 3,960 theatres
3. It Ends with Us (Sony): $24.0M (-52%) – 3,739 theatres
4. Twisters (Universal): $9.8M (-35%) – 3,483 theatres
5. Coraline (Fathom Events): $8.6M – 1,603 theatres
6. Despicable Me 4 (Universal): $6.0M (-25%) – 2,788 theatres
7. Trap (Warner Bros): $3.4M (-48%) – 2,436 theatres
8. Inside Out 2 (Disney): $3.2M (-34%) – 1,850 theatres
9. Borderlands (Lionsgate): $2.4M (-73%) – 3,125 theatres
10. Stree 2 (Prathyangira Cinemas): $2.2M – 666 theatres

Source: Comscore