Clearly America has moved on and forgiven Will Smith, as Bad Boys: Ride or Die just blew away all of the dreary projections for a $56M haul. That 97% RT Audience Score and A- CinemaScore carried the movie over the full weekend with excellent day-by-day holds to become Smith’s 6th best opening ever, and the largest opening weekend for an R-rated movie since Oppenheimer. And with a Pixar animated movie as the only new release next weekend, Bad Boys should rake it in once again with little competition.
Of course, it couldn’t be wins for all newcomers, as The Watchers really struggled to make only $7M. We knew the RT critics and audience weren’t impressed, but that final C- CinemaScore sealed its fate. It’s made the list… for now.
Top 10 IN
- #6 Bad Boys: Ride or Die
- #10 The Watchers
Top 10 OUT
- Sight
- Back to Black (Sorry Justin, it had to be.)
Holdover News
- Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes had its third straight sub-50% hold to oh-so-barely miss the $150M plateau. It’ll remain #1 for at least one more week.
- IF just jumped up to #2 thanks to another excellent hold of only -25% (the best of not just the weekend, but of any movie this summer). It’ll likely cross $100M after next weekend.
- Fall Guy might’ve slid to #3, but it just had its fourth straight weekend of a sub-50% hold. At this rate it may very well stick around till the end.
- Garfield had a fantastic -28.6% hold to nearly hit $70M after three weekends.
- Furiosa just can’t catch a break, as the summer’s best-rated movie suffered a -61% drop after last weekend’s -59% drop. I guess we’ll be seeing it on MAX shortly.
- Both 5/3 releases Tarot and Star Wars: Episode 1 (re-release) are still hanging on, but not for much longer.
- Interestingly, aside from Furiosa all of the major movies are enjoying fantastic ensuing holds after their mostly disappointing openings. There’s still hope for (almost) all of them.
Next Weekend: The good times should keep rolling with another biggie in Pixar’s Inside Out (selected by 41 players). The only Wide release of the weekend doesn’t yet have any reviews, but early tracking per Boxoffice Pro is in the $70-100M range.
Perhaps the month of May was just a false start and June is when folks really believe the summer begins??