Box Office Recap: Weekend of May 19th, 2023
With this weekend in the books, it is time to look at the returns at the box office for this past week. Not a ton of shakeups this week besides the arrival of Fast X but let's take a look at the numbers:
- Fast X: $67.5 Million
- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: $32.0 Million
- The Super Mario Bros. Movie: $9.8 Million
- Book Club: The Next Chapter: $3.0 Million
- Evil Dead Rise: $2.4 Million
No surprise that Fast X managed to unseat Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 as box office king this weekend. It opened higher than Hobbs and Shaw within the franchise's recent history but only pulled more than the first three movies (The Fast and the Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) in their opening weekends. That said, this movie may have longer legs than the previous entries because it does not have substantive competition within the genre until The Flash mid-June.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 hit #2 worldwide for 2023 this weekend with it's impressive staying power, especially considering that the movie did not have any of the premium screens that it did over the first two weeks. In its third week it managed to outgross Shazam! Fury of the Gods in its opening weekend which is fairly impressive.
All that said, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is likely to carry on as the #1 movie at the box office this year for the foreseeable future considering it has now eclipsed $1.2 billion. That said, there are a few major family movies coming over the next few weeks that should effectively end it's run between Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Elemental, and Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kracken all in the month of June.
Book Club: The Next Chapter joins Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret in the dubious club of movies that underperform dramatically at the box office for 2023. That said, the budget for Book Club was substantially lower so it could have a chance at making its budget back on streaming.
Finally, still kicking in the top five is Evil Dead Rise, a movie that almost ended up on streaming rather than pulling over $100 million at the box office over its run. Horror sells, especially well-made horror when it gets the chance to breathe without competition.
