Box Office Report for the Week of March 8

It’s a spring break hit for Disney and Pixar, who, after the box-office disappointment of Elio, finally have an original animated success with Hoppers. Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, and the movie has now surpassed GOAT as the highest-grossing opening for an original animated production since…Pixar’s Coco.

Pixar breaking their own records seemed to be more typical a decade ago, but they’ve now seemed interested in reminding audiences that they still hold enough power in the animated space. There was a time when all Pixar films were major theatrical events, until a string of critical and commercial disappointments made us wonder whether the studio still had it. With Hoppers, they absolutely still do. The film grossed over $46 million in its opening weekend domestically, with a global tally of $88 million, a fantastic start to a movie that will undoubtedly have legs in the weeks to come, since family offerings are quite sparse as of late.

On the flip side, Warner Bros. has had its first flop since last year’s The Alto Knights with Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s The Bride! With a $90 million price tag, the movie opened at only $7.2 million domestically and $13.6 globally. It is, so far, the year’s biggest box office bomb, and there’s no path to profitability for a movie that honestly seemed like a big ask from the moment it was announced. Joker: Folie à Deux comparisons from critics certainly didn’t help (that movie was a massive commercial failure), and muted audience reactions from advanced screenings essentially put the nail in its coffin before the movie was even released.

Still, there’s something to commend for Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy to release something like this at a time when major film studios are afraid of taking risks. Unfortunately, it also appears to be the last of its kind if David Ellison succeeds in acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery. The merger was announced, yes, but it could take a long time before it even gets approved by various regulatory and gubernatorial bodies in the United States and abroad. It may also not close at all, depending on ongoing investigations.

The one thing that is clear, however, is that Ellison isn’t interested in auteur-driven entertainment, as illustrated by Paramount-Skydance’s bland slate of upcoming franchise titles. He is promising to release at least 15 films a year from Warner Bros. (which, by the way, won’t happen), but they likely won’t be as bold or authorial as The Bride!, Sinners, or One Battle After Another. These are all risky pictures that might have been a gamble for the studio. Some of them paid off. Others didn’t. However, no one knew until they tried, trusted in their filmmakers to deliver, and hoped the audience would embark along the way. We may lose that if this deal goes through, and that’s a terrifying thought for the future of cinema as a whole.

However, since we need movies more than ever, they will always prevail and find a way to blow us all away…

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

1. Hoppers (Disney): $46.0M – 4,000 theatres
2. Scream 7 (Paramount): $17.3M (-73%) – 3,540 theatres
3. The Bride! (Warner Bros): $7.2M – 3,304 theatres
4. GOAT (Sony): $6.6M (-45%) – 3,303 theatres
5. Wuthering Heights (Warner Bros): $3.7M (-44%) – 2,512 theatres
6. Crime 101 (Amazon MGM Studios): $2.0M (-40%) – 1,910 theatres
7. Send Help (Disney): $1.6M (-52%) – 1,650 theatres
8. I Can Only Imagine 2 (Lionsgate): $1.5M (-52%) – 1,834 theatres
9. EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert (NEON): $1.5M (-57%) – 1,965 theatres
10. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – Infinity Castle (re-release) (Sony): $1.3M – 832 theatres

Source: Comscore