A Quiet Place Part II is now the first movie to cross $100 million at the box office in over a year

When it came out in theaters earlier this month, A Quiet Place Part II technically sort of opened higher than the first movie, a sure-fire sign that American movie theaters are slowly coming back to more or less full strength… and also a sure-fire sign that the movie didn’t have a ton of competition, it opened on a long weekend and therefore hand extra day that the first movie didn’t have, and it’s a sequel to a movie that had more of a tail than it did a huge, splashy opening weekend. Still, though, it made good money, and now it has continued to make money over the last few weeks. In fact, it has now much so much money that A Quiet Place Part II is officially the first movie to cross $100 million at the U.S. box office during “the pandemic era.”

This news, and that somewhat vague descriptor, come from Variety, which points out that John Krasinski’s spooky sequel is sitting at $108 million domestic and $80 million internationally. Godzilla Vs. Kong is currently at $99.6 million, so it will most likely cross $100 million soon, but A Quiet Place was the first one to hit that milestone. One interesting detail to note here is that Godzilla Vs. Kong opened simultaneously at the box office and on HBO Max, while A Quiet Place Part II was only in theaters, so traditionalists might put that as a point in favor of regular theatrical releases rather than an all-streaming future—though we’re talking a difference of $8 million, so you could really use the fact to argue both points if so inclined.

But let’s go back to early days of 2020 now, before the plague and before everything shut down, to determine what movie was the last one to cross $100 million. One good guess would be Onward, which came out right before everything fell apart and had that Disney/Pixar cartoon prestige, but no, it only made $60 million in the U.S. before theaters closed. How about Bad Boys For Life, the biggest movie of 2020 by a vast margin? It made $200 million, but no, there was another big movie in between those two… but you’ve gotta go fast if you want to catch it.

Yes, we’re talking Sonic The Hedgehog, which would’ve gone down in history as the final successful movie ever if theaters not begun to bounce back. In an even worse version of 2020 where society fully collapsed, people would be staging reenactments of Sonic like that scene in Reign Of Fire where Gerard Butler and Christian Bale do Star Wars. Remember Reign Of Fire? It made $82 million worldwide. Maybe we should be reenacting that for future kids.