Box Office Report for the Week of February 23

This weekend, Captain America: Brave New World still managed to hang on to the #1 spot, with little to no competition. With $28.2 million tally and a 68% drop, it will fortunately not be the worst drop-off for a Marvel Cinematic Universe film (that award goes to The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania), but it isn’t the best one either. The film needs about $425 million to break even, which it will likely hit, even with the diminishing returns it will receive from subsequent weekends. 

This weekend saw the release of Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, which, thanks to a clever marketing campaign, has once again put the filmmaker on top of NEON’s box office pedestal. While not reaching the success of Longlegs, the film is now the second highest-grossing opening weekend in NEON’s history, with a $14.2 million tally, already making its small budget of $10 million back in one weekend. Time will tell if the film will have the same word-of-mouth reception that Longlegs had, but the discussions on this picture are far colder than they were for Perkins’ last film. 

It’ll be interesting to see if he can maintain the same level of commercial viability he had with his previous two NEON efforts for his next project, Keeper, starring Tatiana Maslany and Rossif Sutherland. A trailer is attached after the end credits of The Monkey, which gives a much different vibe than the comedy/horror film he just released. If NEON can keep the marketing campaigns fresh and inventive, I don’t see why this could not be the studio’s third highest-grossing opening of all time, or could even beat the record now held by The Monkey and Longlegs!. We won’t have to wait very long to find out, as the film is slated to release this October. 

Meanwhile, The Unbreakable Boy has completely bombed in its first week, after Lionsgate was on a relatively stable streak with Den of Thieves 2: Pantera and Flight Risk. Making only $2.5 million, the movie’s released was delayed a significant number of times, first due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and then many other times before finally releasing this weekend. It’s worth noting that, despite it being a 2025 release, the movie entered production in 2021, and a lot has changed from that time until now, particularly for its lead star, Zachary Levi. Despite a high CinemaScore, the movie was not going to be more than dead on arrival as it opened this weekend, especially when bigger films, such as Ne Zha 2, which has now become the highest-grossing animated film of all time and the only animated production to make $2 billion at the global box office, are overshadowing it greatly. 

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

1. Captain America: Brave New World (Disney): $28.2M (-68.2%) – 4,105 theatres
2. The Monkey (NEON): $14.2M – 3,200 theatres
3. Paddington in Peru (Sony): $6.5M (-49%) – 3,890 theatres
4. Dog Man (Universal): $5.9M (-40%) – 3,179 theatres
5. Ne Zha 2 (CMC Films): $3.0M (-59.9%) – 785 theatres
6. Heart Eyes (Sony): $2.8M (-71%) – 3,003 theatres
7. Mufasa: The Lion King (Disney): $2.5M (-41%) – 1,925 theatres
8. The Unbreakable Boy (Lionsgate): $2.5M – 1,687 theatres
9. Chhaava (Yash Raj Films): $1.49M – 395 theatres
10. One Of Them Days (Sony): $1.41M (-53%) – 1,104 theatres

Source: Comscore