Even if there wasn’t a pandemic, odds are this would still be a hard weekend at the domestic box office, what with all the distraction that came out of our nation’s Capitol this past week. Television news seems to be filled with enough suspense and cliffhangers with the Capitol Insurrection, versus the big screen, as we all cling to our TV screens at home to witness how President Donald J. Trump will leave office, expectedly with chaos in tow.
Warner Bros.’ Wonder Woman 1984 in its third weekend continued to emulate the legs of a horror movie, down -45% with $3M at 2,218 theaters and a running B.O. of $32.6M. It’s quite clear this movie isn’t going to make the money that Tenet did stateside at $58M and we knew that all along as 60% of all movie theaters are shutdown, including No. 2 chain Regal (Pennsylvania and Colorado reopened this past weekend I heard). Adding further insult to injury: I hear that after a dismal holiday period some movie theaters have decided to close down, and are skipping paying Warners on WW1984; that’s how bad things are. The studio, which normally doesn’t need to fight for its rental dollars, will need to do so now.
The Patty Jenkins directed sequel is in its 17th day of release, which means it has another two weeks before HBO Max takes the title off its streaming service and the movie plays for another ~30 days in movie theaters. WarnerMedia hasn’t blared any numerical trumpets as to how Wonder Woman 1984 did on HBO Max in regards to viewers and subscribers, and I understand if there’s anything positive to report, we’ll hear about on the next AT&T earnings call. Still, if there was something awesome to shout out to the world about WW1984‘s success on HBO Max…we would have already heard about it. Social media analytics corp RelishMix says in regards to the sequel’s social media chatter “Incremental mentions about HBOMax and connectivity issues are on Twitter and tapering — and Covid mentions are sprinkled across YouTube, Twitter and on Facebook.”
Worldwide, WW1984 stands at $131.4M. Tenet grossed $362.9M, and it’s impossible for WW1984 to even mirror those results. Most theatres in Europe remain closed or are operating with significant capacity restrictions.
Meanwhile, those movies which had a longer theatrical window than WW1984, held in as best they could during a pandemic with Universal/DreamWorks Animation’s Croods: A New Age in 2nd with $1.8M (-19%) in weekend 7 and a cume of $36.8M, Uni’s News of the World with $1.24M in weekend 3, -27% and a total of $7.1M, Sony/Screen Gems’ Monster Hunter in weekend 4 with $1.1M, -13%, with $7.8M and Lionsgate’s Fatale in weekend 4 in 5th place with around $670K and a total of $4M.
