NOPE easily won the weekend box office, grossing $44M on its opening weekend. Jordan Peele’s Sci-Fi Horror film received a strong 82% Tomatometer score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and a more lukewarm 73% audience score from moviegoers. Peele won an Academy Award for his writing and is now emerging as the directorial dean of suspense, drawing comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg.
NOPE is Peele’s third directorial feature film, coming after the very successful GET OUT (2017) and US (2019), which went on to gross $175M and $176M respectively. Peele won his Oscar for Best Original Script for GET OUT.
NOPE’S $44M in its opening weekend landed in between GET OUT with $33M and US with $71M, with the total run projected to be $140M-$150M. NOPE only cost $68M to produce, which adds up to a very profitable business relationship between Peele and Universal.
Disney/Marvel’s THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER came in second place with $22.1M this weekend, suffering a continued steady decline of 53% from last weekend. After three weekends in theatres, THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER has shown a greater week-to-week decline than any other previous Marvel title with the exception of MORBIUS. Of course, the good news is that its worldwide cume stands at $598M, on a budget of $250M, making it another example of a very profitable feature in the THOR franchise.
MINIONS: THE RISE OF GRU Finished third with a gross of $17.7M, dropping by only from last weekend. GRU is well on its way to becoming the second highest-grossing title in the DESPICABLE ME/MINIONS cinematic universe, with an estimated total run in theatres landing at around $340M. That would out-pace easily DESPICABLE ME 2, which generated $368M cume in 2017.
WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING finished fourth with a gross of $10.3M and a drop of only 40% as word of mouth begins to kick in. This bodes very well for subsequent weeks.
It took eight weeks for TOP GUN: MAVERICK to sink down below the top three movies on the weekend box office chart. In its ninth weekend, it dropped to fifth, but the indefatigable feature still took in $10M, which represents a decline of only 19% from last weekend. It has now grossed $636M in North America, which positions it as the number nine film of all time in the domestic market. With a lineup of less-than-stellar new releases ahead, TOP GUN: MAVERICK is certain to still be playing at the multiplex through the Labor Day weekend, and may rise up to a total domestic gross of $667M, which would place it as the number seven domestic box office performer of all time.
Our favorite indie title MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON expanded to 590 locations in its fifth weekend in theatres, and has begun to sputter in its search to resonate with a broader commercial audience. The A24 release is up to $2.9M overall, compared with A24’s most recent successful indie film EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE with just passed $68M. Critics and audiences love MARCEL, scoring 99% and 93% respectively on Rotten Tomatoes. This highlights the degree of difficulty a smaller title has to become a breakout success in the era of superheroes and blockbusters.
