It’s a bit early to write up the weekend’s box office numbers, since something completely ridiculous could theoretically happen tonight and throw it all into disarray, but tomorrow is Labor Day and our union forefathers didn’t get their heads busted open by Pinkertons for nothing. Speaking of doing things for nothing: All of this quarantining we’ve been worrying about for six months! Oh sure, it’s easy to stay at home when someone will deliver your groceries or when all of the restaurants and bars are closed, but apparently that all goes out the window when Christopher Nolan’s got a new movie in theaters. Granted, you won’t definitely get the virus by going to a movie theater, but it certainly doesn’t help. We talked to an expert about it and everything.
But a lot of people must not care about that, because Nolan’s Tenet made more than $20 million this weekend. By comparison, The New Mutants took the top spot last week with $7 million, so while it wouldn’t be an especially impressive take pre-pandemic, it is a ton of money for mid-pandemic. In one weekend, it doubled the amount of money The New Mutants has made in two weeks (it’s sitting just a hair under $3 million for this weekend). Then again, Warner Bros. insisted for months that this is a movie that needed to be in theaters and could not be dumped to on-demand or delayed to 2021 like every other big 2020 movie has been, so is $20 million (domestic) worth it?
Moving on, Unhinged came in third with $1.6 million, followed by The Personal History Of David Copperfield and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge On The Run sitting a bit under $400,000. So it’s pretty rough everywhere other than Tenet, but actually that’s good because we don’t necessarily want people going to physical movie theaters these days and putting themselves and others at risk.
For more detailed analysis of this weekend’s numbers, head over to Box Office Mojo.