Weekend Box Office: Unhinged heralds the reopening of theaters
Boy, that was a scary 20-something weeks, huh? That’s how long it’s been since we did a real check-in on how much money new releases had made at the weekend box office. Onward made $10 million, something that we described as a “religious guitar movie” made $9.5 million, and Vin Diesel’s now-doomed-to-be-an-answer-to-a-trivia-question Bloodshot made $9.3 million. Since then, despite our insistence that people should not be going out unnecessarily so we can hopefully end this pandemic sooner rather than later (a hilarious thing to look back on now that it’s fucking August), the coronavirus did indeed get worse and worse and worse and then pretty much everything in the country was shut down for an extended period of time… until—with absolutely no evidence to back this up and, if anything, a mountain of evidence against it—people decided that everything was better and that it was probably safe enough to go out to bars and restaurants and, most importantly for this story, movie theaters.
So that brings us to this week, with the Russell Crowe road-rage thriller Unhinged continuing its one-movie crusade to reopen the nation’s movie theaters. Things got off to a hesitant start last week when Unhinged opened, but the movie’s rollout expanded dramatically this week by making just over $4 million off of 1,823 theaters (for comparison’s sake, a full pre-COVID rollout would be over 4,000 theaters). That means its per-screen average was down a bit, but it’s still a 575 percent increase from last week’s gross. If you ignore literally every other factor, that’s damn impressive.
Coming in at number two in the top 10 is The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge On The Run, which only expanded a little bit from last week and only made $550,000. The rest of the lineup is pretty rough, with Unhinged having swallowed up all of the ticket money this weekend apparently, leaving less than $300,000 each for The Goonies, Cut Throat City, The Empire Strikes Back, Peninsula, Jurassic Park, Back To The Future, and Shia LaBeouf’s The Tax Collector—many of which you probably have on DVD or could easily rent without looking away from whatever device you’re reading this on. The only other new opening this week, Tesla, landed a meager $42,000 from 108 theaters.
For a more in-depth analysis of this weekend’s box office, head over to Box Office Mojo.
Note: A previous version of this story mistakenly used incorrect box office numbers. The story has been updated to correctly reflect accurate information. We regret the error.