Weekend Box Office: Step aside Dear Evan Hansen, America still loves Shang-Chi

If Dear Evan Hansen ever had a shot at ending Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings’ run of box office dominance, it probably dried up the moment Disney decided not to give its superhero movie a day-and-date Disney+ release (which, as we’ve discussed at length on this website, backfired dramatically for Black Widow). It also probably dried up the first time someone saw the 27-year-old Ben Platt—Tony-winning star of the Broadway version of Dear Evan Hanson—looking bizarrely out of place as a high school student in the movie version. So maybe there was never any chance that Dear Evan Hansen would dethrone Shang-Chi, but at least we now have confirmation that we’re living in a relatively normal universe where relatively normal things do still tend to happen. (It was really up in the air for a while, though.)

All of that is a pointlessly roundabout way of saying that Shang-Chi, in its fourth week in theaters, nearly doubled the box office take of second-place finisher Dear Evan Hansen in its first week. Shang-Chi made $13 million (juuust short of enough to crack $200 million, but it still holds the record now for highest grossing film since pre-COVID) and Dear Evan Hanson made $7.5 million, and while $7.5 million is nothing to write home about, it’s very much fine for this mid-pandemic hellworld we’re stuck in. We’ll know if it’s a proper flop next week, since it was guaranteed to make at least some money with its wide release and name recognition.

Further down the charts is Free Guy, sitting in third with $4 million after seven weeks. That puts it at $114 million total, which is almost the exact same amount of money as Jungle Cruise (which made $1.7 million this week and is in sixth place). In between those two movies are Candyman ($2.5 million this week, $56 million total) and Cry Macho ($2.1 million this week, a paltry $8 million total after two weeks).

The only other particularly notable thing about this weekend’s box office is that we fell only $30,000 short of every movie in the top 10 making over $1 million. That happened a few times over the summer when there a bunch of new movies out and the Delta Variant hadn’t started ripping its way through unvaccinated communities, but it’s been pretty rare ever since… well, you know. We don’t have to keep coming up with new ways to say “COVID happened.” We all remember it happening.

For a more detailed breakdown of this weekend’s box office numbers, head over to Box Office Mojo.