Industry News
by saidiontheside

saidi’s take – 4/22/2025

Hello everyone,

BOX OFFICE: Before the weekend, predictions were that it would be a neck and neck race between the 3rd weekend of “The Minecraft Movie” and the new horror movie “Sinners” but over the weekend it was clear that “Sinners” would pull ahead thanks to great word of mouth.  It’s the first horror movie to get an audience rating of “A”.  It made $48 million for #1 while “A Minecraft Movie” went down approx. 48% to make $40.5 million on its 3rd weekend.  #3 was the animated movie “The King of Kings” which only sunk approx. 9% and GAINED about 335 screens for its second weekend to make $17.5 million. 

Overall, the total domestic weekend box office went down slightly – about 8% – to $135.7 million total. 

WORLDWIDE BOX OFFICE: “A Minecraft Movie” is still going strong internationally making almost $725 million total worldwide box office.  The only exception is in China where the #1 movie in the world for 2025 so far – “Ne Zha 2” rose to the #1 spot again.  The new movie “Sinners” did as expected internationally with $15 million for a worldwide total of approx. $61 million. 

OTHER NEWS:

Although the new Academy Award for “Stunt Design” doesn’t start until 2027 there is a new category which starts this year “Casting”.  This past week the Academy announced the rules for nominating movies in that category.  They also announced a few other rules including “voters must now watch ALL nominated films in each category in order to be eligible to vote in the final round” (although I’m not sure how they’ll verify that). 

This past weekend there was a “Star Wars Celebration” in Tokyo, Japan where they announced that the new Star Wars movie from director Shawn Levy is named “Starfighter”.  It will star Ryan Gosling and it will be released in approx. 2 years on May 28, 2027.

They also showed a few scenes of the next Star Wars movie “The Mandalorian and Grogu” which will come out on May 22 next year.  The footage included scenes with Sigourney Weaver and Jeremy Allen White.  It was revealed that Jeremy Allen White will play Jabba the Hutts son Rotta the Hutt.

LITTLE BIT OF HUMOR:

9 YEARS LATER?????  I hope the trailer didn’t say “coming soon” at the end of it.