Weekend Box Office: Judas And The Black Messiah makes its simultaneous debut
The current narrative of the U.S. box office, by default, is all about Warner Bros. and its simultaneous releases—if only because it’s doing so many of them. We’ve already seen how Wonder Woman 1984 and The Little Things have fared, and now WB has just dropped its third simultaneous HBO Max/theatrical release: Judas And The Black Messiah. Unfortunately for Shaka King’s Black Panthers drama, the film—despite it seeming like the best of the three—has had the worst opening. It landed at just over $2 million, just a hair over what The Little Things made this past weekend (its third on the charts).
In third place, still hovering right around $2 million, is The Croods: A New Age, which has made over $48 million over 12 weeks. Now, that sounds like a lot, but that’s only because this COVID era has made us forget just how much money movies used to make (it’s not even half of what the first Croods made domestically). After that is WW84, which has been chasing The Croods since its release but only made $1.1 million this week (for a total of $41 million). Liam Neeson’s The Marksman made nearly the same amount, making it the last of the movies on the list to make over $1 million.
The two big newcomers this week other than Judas And The Black Messiah were Robin Wright’s Land and Kevin Macdonald’s The Mauritanian. The former debuted at $940,000 and the latter opened at $163,000. And, as always, it’s worth pointing out that no movie is really going to do well at the box office (even after several months) because it’s not really safe to go to a theater and the federal government has done a poor job of taking the necessary steps to help change that.
For a more detailed breakdown of this weekend’s box office numbers, head over to Box Office Mojo.