Industry News
by saidiontheside

saidi’s take – 4/29/2025

Hello everyone,

BOX OFFICE: Two big surprises for the final weekend in April.  First, the hit movie “Sinners” continues to bring in audiences adding 40 ADDITIONAL screens on its second weekend and falling LESS THAN 5%.  It made $48 million the first weekend and made $45.7 million on its second weekend.  Second surprise is that the 20th anniversary re-release of “Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith” made MORE THAN ANY NEW RELEASE this weekend.  The re-release made $25.5 million for #2 at the domestic box office while the new movie “The Accountant 2” made $24.5 million – and “The Accountant 2” was on about 800 more screens.

The top 4 movies making $45.7 million (“Sinners”) , $25.5 million (“Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith”), $24.5 (“The Accountant 2”), and $22.7 million (“A Minecraft Movie”) helped the total domestic box office go up approx. 8% this past weekend.  It’s expected to go up even more with the upcoming Marvel movie “Thunderbolts*” next weekend.

WORLDWIDE BOX OFFICE:  Worldwide “A Minecraft Movie” continues to dominate the box office.  The worldwide box office for the movie is now over $810 million – which is almost double the next movie (“Captain America: Brave New World” is at $414 million).  In foreign box offices, the re-release of “Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith” made $17 million which beat the new release “The Accountant 2” ($13.7 million) and the 2nd weekend of “Sinners” ($13.5 million).  Meanwhile the #1 blockbuster “Ne Zha 2” – is still on top of the China box office.

OTHER NEWS:

The release date for the James L Brooks directed “Ella McKay” was just pushed to the end of the year.  It was going to come out on Sept 19 but was just rescheduled 3 months later to Dec 12.

There’s more information about the MSG Sphere version of “The Wizard of Oz” opening later this year.  According to a Las Vegas website they used AI to change scenes that had a lot of cuts of 1 or 2 person shots to showing full shots of the entire cast to better fill up the whole screen (see this link for more info).

The Cinelounge movie theater is SAVED.  The movie theater closed in March due to lack of funds but an “angel” stepped in and the movie theater in Hollywood on Sunset Blvd will re-open this week.

LITTLE BIT OF HUMOR:

To promote “The Accountant 2”, the bought some bus shelter benches with a fake advertisement for the accountant featured in the movie……

…since the paparazzi often photographs Ben Affleck out and about when he’s not working, he decided to sit on one of the benches advertising the new movie so the paparazzi will give the movie some free promotion.