Hello everyone,
BOX OFFICE: The box office prayers have been answered!!! “Inside Out 2” BLEW PAST it’s estimates of $80-100 million. Over the weekend, some predicted it would be a better opening weekend than ANY MOVIE that opened last year, but in the end it fell a few million dollars short of last years “Barbie” ($162 million) making $154.2 million. That still make it the second biggest opening weekend of ANY animated movie (#1 is “Incredibles 2”). After just one weekend, the movie is ALREADY #5 on the domestic box office for 2024. Additional good news is that last weeks #1 movie “Bad Boys Ride or Die” only fell approx. 40% on its 2nd weekend (instead of 50-60% like recent releases “Furiosa”, “ IF” and “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” did) coming in at #2 with $33.7 million. Unfortunately, no other movies made over $6 million. #9 and #10 in the top 10 didn’t even make $1 million. “Inside Out 2” made $13 million in its Thursday night previews which is more than some movies made in their opening weekend this year.
Since “Inside Out 2” made MORE THAN THE TOTAL DOMESTIC BOX OFFICE LAST WEEK it had no problem propelling the total domestic weekend to over $200 million for the first time this year. The domestic weekend box office total of $213 million is OVER TWICE AS MUCH as last weekend (up 105.2%) and it’s 23% higher than the same weekend last year when “The Flash” and “Elemental” (last years Pixar movie) was released with a total domestic box office of $163.8 million.
WORLDWIDE BOX OFFICE: The international box office also got a jolt from Inside Out 2” which has a total domestic box office of almost $300 million after making $140 million internationally. That means it’s also the best international and best worldwide opening of 2024 so far. Although “Inside Out 2” made more than last years “Super Mario Bros Movie” domestically, it didn’t come close to its worldwide opening weekend of $375 million (part of that is because “The Super Mario Bros Movie” opened in some foreign countries before its domestic opening weekend).
OTHER NEWS:
It was reported that the 2nd Marvel movie coming in 2025 “Thunderbolts*” just finished principal photography (yes, the * is part of the title – not sure why), it was also reported that the 4th Marvel movie currently scheduled for next year, “Blade”, is still having trouble because the 2nd director who was working on the movie has just left the production.
Last week it was announced that Paramount has pulled out of their negotiations to merge with Skydance. Although there are two new investor groups interested in Paramount (led by Edgar Bromfman and Steven Paul), no officially negotiations between either group has been announced yet. This has made Paramounts stock plunge recently.
One of the only weekends this summer with 3 wide studio releases has now gone down to 2. Warner Bros moved up the M. Night Shyamalan Mystery/Thriller “Trap” one week so it’s released on August 2nd. This is only 1 week after “Deadpool and Wolverine” – expected to be the biggest movie of the summer – but the only other new movie that weekend is the family movie “Harold and the Purple Crayon”. On its former release date of Aug 9 it would have opened against the sci-fi/action movie “Borderlands” and the drama “It Ends With Us”.
Sony Pictures is now the very first studio to go into the theatrical business (although Disney “unofficially” has run the El Capitan theater in Hollywood for years) by purchasing the financially troubled Alamo Drafthouse theater chain last week.
Speaking of the El Capitan theater. Since “Deadpool and Wolverine” officially has an R rating, it looks like – for the first time in SEVERAL YEARS (since it only played Disney/Pixar/Lucasfilm movies) the El Capitan movie theater will be playing 2 R RATED MOVIES IN A ROW this summer. It will show “Deadpool and Wolverine” when it opens at the end of July and then it will play “Alien Romulus” right after that movie in the middle of August.
LITTLE BIT OF HUMOR:
That list is from the movie “WarGames” (1983). If the rumored remake is real, it will DEFINITELY need to have something to do with A I.
LOS ANGELES FILM REVIEW 