After blasting off with a huge holiday weekend, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is keeping up its box office momentum. Deadline reports that it’s heading for a massive $69-70 million weekend, which is exactly what we predicted earlier this week. With its final weekend gross likely to push it close to $310 million domestically, it’s only running about 12% behind what the last film, The Super Mario Bros Movie, made. That one ended up making over $574 million domestically—breaking records as Illumination’s biggest movie ever. There’s a good chance the sequel will finish around $500 million (or—on the low end—$450 million), meaning it will still end its run as Illumination’s second highest-grossing movie ever (the next highest is Minions: The Rise of Gru with $370 million).
Project Hail Mary will easily hit second place, with a solid $27 million as it comes closer to the $300 million mark (it will likely end its domestic run around $320-350 million), while A24’s The Drama is holding up better than expected with $8.5 million, which is fairly strong, with it only dropping in the 45% range. Its success seems to have cut into the box office for the rom-com You, Me and Tuscany, which is opening soft, with about $8.3 million. However, it’s worth noting that the CinemaScore is a pretty good A-minus, so even if it stumbles out of the gate a bit, it could have good legs at the box office. Next weekend will really be the judge as to whether or not this proves to be the sleeper hit many hoped for (as rom-coms, in general, rarely get made for theaters anymore).
Meanwhile, two indie horror titles, Faces of Death and Exit 8, are looking at grosses of about $1.8 million and $1.5 million. Faces of Death seems to be landing with a thud, with a low C CinemaScore rating, but Exit 8 has already made close to $40 million internationally, making the U.S. opening little more than the icing on the cake for this well-reviewed video game adaptation.
What are you seeing this weekend? Let us know in the comments.
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