Weekend Box Office: Goodbye grandpa and Tenet, hello Honest Thief
The pandemic is still going on, there’s no hope on the horizon, and the movie theater industry is going to be destroyed if things don’t change, but also it’s not necessarily safe to go to a movie theater and the government has no interest in helping anyone but Donald Trump and his rotten family, so the only way movie theaters are making any money is by people going to movies even though doing so could put themselves and others at risk. Got all that? Good, because now that it’s out of the way, let’s talk about the box office without the grim specter of the pandemic and the grimmer specter of Donald Trump hanging over us like a couple of… you know, grim specters.
Last week’s surprise box office winner, the Liam Neeson-starring Honest Thief, is still on top, having added $2.3 million to its haul for a total of $7.4 million. That’s pretty good for mid-pandem—oops, almost mentioned it there. That total is a hair higher than the champ it knocked out, Robert De Niro’s The War With Grandpa, which made $1.8 million this past weekend (landing it in second place) and pushing it to a total of $9.7 million. In third place we have Tenet, a movie some of us have heard about more than the Christopher Nolan movies we’ve actually seen, which made a scant $1.3 million for a significantly larger (yet still not very good, all things considered) total of $52 million. After that is the first of two new releases, The Empty Man, which made $1.2 million.
Rounding out the top five, we have the benevolent people at Walt Disney Studios asking people to leave the virus-free comfort of their homes to see The Nightmare Before Christmas and Hocus Pocus, which are both on Disney+ and yet made $577,000 and $530,000 this weekend (respectively). Disney also took sixth place with a re-release of Monsters, Inc., because god forbid Mickey Mouse miss out on milking people for an additional $494,000 in the middle of a damn pandemic.
The only other items of particular interested are number eight, After We Collided, which is apparently a teen-romance sequel to a teen-romance movie called After that we definitely remember, and The New Mutants, which landed at number 10 and is now on the verge of drifting out of the range where we feel obligated to talk about it in these write-ups. Sorry, New Mutants. We’ll remember the good week when you made some money before Tenet showed up.
For more detailed analysis of this weekend’s box office numbers, head over to Box Office Mojo.