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Warner Bros’ DC pic The Flash, despite tumbling down with a $55M start, will remain atop the box office with a $16.5M-$24.7M second-weekend take as the marketplace largely takes a breath sans tentpoles before Disney/Lucasfilm’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny arrives for the Independence Day stretch. That Weekend 2 slide for The Flash reps a 55%-70% decline.
A lot of déjà vu here for Warner Bros when it comes to The Flash. Remember Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern back in 2011? That also was an attempt to start a DC franchise off a deep-universe character. There’s nothing wrong with that, but lessons weren’t learned here by Warners as it spent $200M to make Green Lantern,and $200M to make The Flash — a pricetag deemed too high by sources to start a potential franchise. Studio accounting practices indicate it’s better to spend more on sequels, not first installments. And if you’re going to do that, you gotta cast up like Dune with marquee names that will fill seats. Green Lantern dropped 66% in Weekend 2 with $18M, with the Ryan Reynolds-led pic bombing and finaling at $116.5M stateside. We could see a similar path here for The Flash.
The Flash did $5.2M on Tuesday, -14% from the Juneteenth holiday Monday take of $6.1M. Remember, it’s discount ticket pricing at most theaters on Tuesday, hence the good hold. Running five-day total is $66.4M, 5% ahead of Green Lantern at the same point in time.
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Sony is hoping to bring comedies back to the screen after they’ve been swallowed up by streaming during the pandemic with the R-rated Gene Stupnitsky-directed No Hard Feelings, starring Jennifer Lawrence. The pic follows Maddie (Lawrence), a young woman on the brink of losing her home who answers an ad to mentor an introverted 19-year-old. The reported $45M movie (before P&A) is looking at a $12M start at 3,000 theaters. Female skewing here for the Sony comedy, with an eye at a wide swath of the 18-49 demo.
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Previews begin at 4 p.m. Thursday at 2,675 theaters. If Sony can hit that $12M number or even more, that’s a significant lift from its previous R-rated summer comedy, Rough Night starring Scarlett Johansson, which tanked back in 2017. That posted an $8M opening and $22.1M domestic final off a $20M production cost.
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Focus Features is expanding Wes Anderson’s absurdist romp Asteroid City from six NYC and LA locations to about 1,500 theaters. Outlook is in the single-digit millions. During the fall after movie theaters opened in 2021, Anderson’s The French Dispatch saw a second weekend of $2.6M from a 788-theater expansion, and $2.58M in Weekend 3 when Searchlight took that movie to 1,205 theaters The movie finaled at $16.1M domestic. Last weekend, the Anderson movie posted the biggest theater average post-pandemic for any movie with $140,800 off a $845,000 3-day.
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Holdovers will continue to fill in gaps on the chart with Sony Animation’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse‘s Weekend 4 and Weekend 2 of Disney/Pixar’s disastrous Elemental doing around an estimated $16M apiece. Elemental made $4.9M on Tuesday, taking its five-day to $39.8M. The toon’s $29.6M opening repped an all-time near-worst start for Pixar movie, even lower than 1998’s A Bug’s Life ($33.2M), the pandemic-eve title Onward ($39.1M) and 2015’s Good Dinosaur ($39.1M), though higher than the $29.1M 3-day of the studio’s first movie, Toy Story, back in 1995. Spider-Verse, now at $290.4M, will cross $300M by Friday. Can it overtake Disney/Marvel Studios’ Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 3 as the highest-grossing movie this summer? That James Gunn-directed finale now stands at $346.4M.
As we told you over the weekend, despite the fallout of Flash and Elemental, the domestic box office is extremely healthy given all the product on marquees. People are going to the movies: The four-day holiday weekend finaled at $194.6M, per Comscore, +17% from the Juneteenth holiday a year ago. The total domestic box office for January 1-June 19 totaled $4.1 billion, +22% from a year ago.