Death On The Nile solves the mystery of the sleepy weekend box office

The initial box office results after the Oscar nominations should be an interesting opportunity to see if anything has managed to translate its buzz into some movement at the box office—something Parasite was very much able to do, for example. This year, since everyone has been so busy seeing Spider-Man: No Way Home and nothing but Spider-Man: No Way Home, you’d think a lot of movie fans would be eager to mask up and head back to the theaters to check out some of the nominated films still hanging on that they might’ve missed.

But you would be wrong. This was another slow weekend at the U.S. box office, possibly because everyone was more interested in Super Bowl or Winter Olympics programming, or because they already saw Spider-Man and didn’t want to see Death On The Nile, or because they had to clear out some of their video game backlog before Elden Ring comes out in a few weeks. Whatever the reason, things were slow.

The aforementioned Death On The Nile took the top prize with $12.8 million, which is pretty medium, followed by Jackass Forever at a little over $8 million (a dramatic drop-off from last week’s debut) for a total of $37 million. Then we have Jennifer Lopez’s Marry Me at exactly $8 million in its debut, then the movie about the Spider-Mans, then Blacklight (the 15th movie Liam Neeson has put out during the pandemic) at just $3.6 million.

Sing 2, Moonfall, and Scream came up next, all making about the same amount of money ($2.8-2.9 million, though Sing 2 has already made plenty), and then Licorice Pizza finally got a wider rollout and jumped to nearly $1 million this week. It has only made $14 million or so after 12 weeks, but it seems to be the one film counting on some kind of Oscars bump. Finishing out the top 10 is a movie we’re surprised that we’re still mentioning in these write-ups: The King’s Man. In a few years, someone is going to say “did you know they made a prequel to the very popular Kingsman movies and nobody noticed?” and the vast majority of us will say “No way.”

Here’s the list again in list form, courtesy of Box Office Mojo.

• Death On The Nile
• Jackass Forever
• Marry Me
• Spider-Man: No Way Home
• Blacklight
• Sing 2
• Moonfall
• Scream
• Licorice Pizza
• The King’s Man