| Date | |
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| Author | Zoe Aresti |
The Weekend Box Office Round-up
Spider-Man: No Way Home faced strong competition this weekend from Scream but still managed to cling on to the top spot. The Marvel behemoth posted another great hold, falling 28% to £3.2m, which takes its total to a ridiculous £84.1m. It has now overtaken Star Wars: The last Jedi (£82.7m) to become the seventh highest grossing film in UK & Ireland history and it’s now just £4.6m behind Avengers: Endgame in sixth place and it looks like it’s going to have the legs to get there. Who would have predicted that?
Horror sequel Scream opened in second with an impressive £2.5m. Horror films have been performing strongly since cinemas re-opened and Scream’s opening compares very favourably with the Friday to Sunday opening of other legacy horrors released recently, Halloween Kills (£1.5m), and Candyman (£1.1m). In fact it’s the highest three-day opening for a horror title since It: Chapter Two in September 2019. Both Halloween Kills and Candyman finished on over £5m, so Scream will be aiming for a final total well north of that. The last Scream film released in UK cinemas was Scream 4 in April 2011 and that opened with £2.1m and finished on £5.6m.
Third spot was taken by The King’s Man, which added £627k, a drop of 31% from last weekend. That takes its total to £6.5m and there’s no major releases aimed at a similar audience until Moonfall on 4 February, and Uncharted a week later, so hopefully The King’s Man can continue to post strong holds over the next few weeks. Clifford The Big Red Dog came in fourth, adding £525k for a new total of £8m. It has one more weekend as the main family film before Sing 2 is unleashed, but it should still be around by the time February half-term rolls around.
Licorice Pizza rounded out the top five, adding £394k, a drop of just 10% from last weekend (once previews are removed). That takes its total to £1.5m and over the weekend it overtook 2012’s The Master to become Paul Thomas Anderson’s fourth biggest film in the UK & Ireland. Next up is Phantom Thread, which grossed £2.8m. Outside of the top five, West Side Story had another good hold in sixth, falling just 15% to £350k. That takes its total to £6.6m
Overall the box office is down 3% from last weekend.
Next Weekend
- Belfast is Kenneth Branagh’s autobiographical tale about a young boy and his Belfast family and their experience in the tumultuous late 1960s. Judi Dench, Caitriona Balfe, Jamie Dornan, Jude Hill, and Ciaran Hinds star.
- Nightmare Alley is Guillermo Del Toro’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning The Shape Of Water. Bradley Cooper plays an ambitious carny with a talent for manipulating people who hooks up with a female psychiatrist who is even more dangerous than he is. Cate Blanchette, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Rooney Mara, and Richard Jenkins are in the knockout cast.
- A Journal For Jordan is the latest directorial project from Denzel Washington. Michael B. Jordan stars as 1st Sgt. Charles Monroe King who, before he is killed in action in Baghdad, authors a journal for his son intended to tell him how to live a decent life despite growing up without a father.
Across The Pond
Scream managed to go one better in the US, knocking Spider-Man: No Way Home from the top spot. The horror sequel debuted with an impressive $30m, which is far superior to the $18.7m Scream 4 opened with in 2011. It’s the Martin Luther King holiday weekend this weekend and including Monday, Scream is expected to finish the weekend with $34m. Spider-Man: No Way Home fell to second but still added $20.8m over the weekend, which takes its total to an incredible $698.7m, making it the fourth highest grossing film in history. It should cross $700m on Monday. Sing 2 continued its good performance, adding $8.3m for a new total of $119.4m. The 355 came in fourth, adding $2.3m for a new total of $8.4m, and The King’s Man completed the top five, adding $2.3m for a new total of $28.7m.