Ticket sales, overall, struggled to get to $42 million for the weekend, making it the worst Super Bowl box office ever, per Variety. Unfortunately, Bleecker Street’s horror movie “Out of Darkness” also opened and made just $1 million on nearly 900 screens, which didn’t help matters. Warner Bros. tried to do its part by re-releasing “Dune,” with the 2021 blockbuster pulling in another $1.6 million. Disney’s re-release of “Turning Red” was DOA, pulling in just $535,000. While those efforts are appreciated, they didn’t do much to move the needle.
As I’ve discussed a great deal in recent weeks, the box office is in dire straits. Overall ticket sales are down at least 10% compared to 2023 so far, and meaningful help isn’t coming until March when heavy-hitters such as “Dune: Part Two” and “Kung Fu Panda 4” arrive. But can any of those big upcoming movies do well enough to make up for the dreadful first two months of the year? That remains to be seen. Ideally, the studios would have, collectively, re-arranged some things to ensure that January and February were a bit more robust. That didn’t happen, so here we are.
Now, we look ahead to Valentine’s Day when both “Bob Marley: One Love” and “Madame Web” arrive in theaters. That should give the box office a shot of life, it’s just a matter of whether or not one (or both) of those films can break out in a truly meaningful way. If not, the rest of the month figures to be equally bleak.
“Argylle” and “Lisa Frankenstein” are in theaters now.