Sandra Bullock made a successful return to movie theatres this weekend with THE LOST CITY, which easily topped the box office charts by taking in $31M. Bullock has long been considered to be one of Hollywood’s most bankable actresses. But after choosing Netflix as the platform for her last two features, THE BIRD BOX (2018) and THE UNFORGIVABLE (2021), exhibitors were feeling left out in the cold.
This year’s THE LOST CITY from Paramount is being compared to 1984 ROMANCING THE STONE from 20th Century Fox. Critics have bestowed a 76% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, while audiences have ranked it even higher at 86%. The project has all the signs of being a hit, with a sequel treatment almost certain. Bullock will be paired with Brad Pitt in her next release, Sony’s highly-anticipated BULLET TRAIN which is set to debut in theatres on July 29th. If you listen closely, you can hear theatre owners clinking champaign glasses together at the prospect of summer hit.
THE BATMAN finished in second place with $20.5M in its fourth weekend, a drop of only 44% from its results last weekend. For the third consecutive week, a speciality title delivered impressive box office results, with the Indian historical drama RRR grossing $9.5M in its opening weekend, with an impressive per-screen average of $7,917 across 1,200 locations. RRR’s worldwide opening day collection was $31.5M, a record amount for any Indian-produced feature. The film is a three-hour epic that tells a fictional story of two revolutionaries in the 1920s who return home to India to fight the colonial rule of the British Raj.
SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME finished eighth with $2M in its 15th weekend, taking its theatrical cume to $800M, the third-highest of all time. INFINITE STORM was the other new film to open in more than 1,000 locations but returned a very finite result with $750k in 1,525 theatres and a tenth place finish. The weekend gross for all pictures was an estimated $88M, which represents 59% of all films at the same weekend in 2019.
