Night Swim sinks beneath Wonka's boots at the weekend box office

2024 has not gotten off to an especially strong start at the box office, Variety reports, with Jason Blum and James Wan’s new horror film Night Swim failing to rise above the head of Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka in its debut, despite the latter film now being in its fourth week in theaters. (And, in an unexpected moment of sympathy with the executives of the Warner Bros. Discovery corporation, we can feel ourselves experiencing some serious frustration that Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom tanked so drastically during the holiday season that we’re now being denied some absolute incredible water/swimming puns. Truly, there is no justice in this world.)

Loose Roald Dahl adaptation Wonka brought in $14.4 million this weekend, giving Warner Bros. a needed win, as the film continues to thrive globally at $465 million overall.. Night Swim, meanwhile, drew in $12 million for Universal—which, given that it only cost about $15 million to make, isn’t all that awful, in terms of “disappointing January horror movie” takes, leastways.

Illumination’s Migration came in third in its third week in theaters, with the Kumail Nanjiani-starring duck comedy not exactly making Super Mario Bros. Movie money for the animation studio; still, its $10 million domestic take (adding up to a $150 million planetary box office performance) doesn’t look too bad against a $70 million budget. As opposed to, yeah, Aquaman 2, which paddled its way to a fourth place finish with roughly $10 million of its own in its third week; the superhero film, as is the way of these things lately, has cleared just $266 million globally against a $200 million budget—a far cry from those heady days of 2018, when the first Aquaman became the first DCEU film to break the $1 billion box office mark.