David Leitch’s action-packed Bullet Train, starring Brad Pitt as a hellbent assassin, easily stayed atop the box office chart in its second weekend as no new Hollywood summer event pic opened nationwide.
This year, the entertainment business emerges from the pandemic and grapples with production and post-production delays. Overall revenue for the weekend was around $66 million, a low point for summer 2022.
Bullet Train is considered the last big Hollywood studio title of summer 2022. The film is doing OK business and earned $13.4 million in its second outing weekend from 4,357 theaters for a 10-day domestic total of $54.2 million. One hitch: even with little competition, Bullet Train fell 54 percent from its opening weekend, although that isn’t unusual for a male-skewing action pic.
Overseas, Bullet Train also continued to speed along, earning another $17 million from a foreign tally of $60 million and global total of $114.5 million.
Elsewhere, Top Gun: Maverick made an impressive comeback in its 12th weekend, upping its theater count from 2,760 to 3,181 locations, including premium screen venues, as part of a special fan appreciation event. The Paramount and Skydance earned an estimated $7.2 million for the weekend from 3,181 cinemas. It’s certain now that the Tom Cruise movie will jump the $700 million mark domestically. (Globally, it has earned north of $1.35 billion, one of the best showings of all time.)
Holdovers DC League of Super-Pets, Nope and Thor: Love and Thunder rounded out the top five.
DC League of Super-Pets, from Warner Bros., finished its third Sunday with a global total of $109.7 million, including $58.3 million domestically.
Disney and Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder stayed high up on the chart for a new global total of $720 million, the highest in the standalone Thor series.
Nope finished the weekend with a global haul of $113.9 million, including $107.5 million domestically, while fellow Universal release Minions: The Rise of Gru is at nearly $800 million globally with $790.4 million. On Sunday, Universal became the first Hollywood studio since 2019 to amass $3 billion in ticket sales at the global box office, according to the studio.
Other titles cracking the top 10 chart include A24’s specialty film Bodies Bodies Bodies, which looks to come in No. 8 with an estimated $3.3 million from 928 theaters for an early total of $3.6 million.
Another new offering this weekend is Lionsgate’s Fall, an adventure-thriller about a group of climbers. The movie, directed by Scott Mann and starring Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner, may fall outside the top 10 with a projected $2.5 million debut from 1,548 locations.
Indie distributor Gravitas Ventures is also taking advantage of the slowdown in summer tentpole fare. The company is releasing Mack and Rita in roughly 2,000 theaters, albeit to dismal results. The adult-skewing comedy, starring Elizabeth Lail as a 30-year-old woman who wakes up after a bachelorette party to discover she is 70 years old, with the older version of herself played by Diane Keaton, is reporting a weekend opening of $1.1 million, although other analysts have that estimate closer to $1 million.
Fall received a B CinemaScore from audiences, while Mack and Rita flunked with a rare D+.
Mack and Rita could be beat by this weekend’s rerelease of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which earned an estimated $1.1 to $1.2 million from only 389 theaters.
