Bullet Train arrives with so-so US$30.1m debut; Easter Sunday stumbles
Bullet Train, a John Wick-ian romp with Brad Pitt in the aisle seat, arrived in US cinemas with a US$30.1 million opening weekend. That was enough to top the domestic box office chart, but it was only a so-so result given its US$90 million price tag and Pitt’s star power. The Sony Pictures release will need to maintain its momentum in the coming weeks as it tries to break even or turn a profit.
Bullet Train is trying to prove that an action flick that is not based on a comic book or a toy line can defy the odds and resonate with audiences. But part of the issue for the film is that critics were not on board. It landed a mediocre 41 per cent approval rating on review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, with many reviewers faulting the movie for being overly derivative of the work of Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino. Trade publication Variety’s chief film critic Peter Debruge was mixed on Bullet Train, writing that “neither the characters nor the film they inhabit are particulrly deep”.
Bullet Train was directed by David Leitch, who once served as a stunt double for Pitt before moving on to oversee the likes of Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2. It centres on a hapless hitman whose mission to nab a suitcase full of cash on high-speed train in Japan devolves into double crosses and brutal fights with an army of competing killers, thieves and social deviants.
Universal and Amblin’s Easter Sunday — the other major release over the weekend just past — stumbled in its opening frame, earning a meagre US$5.3 million for an eighth place finish on domestic charts. Easter Sunday stars stand-up comic Jo Koy as an actor who attends his dysfunctional Filipino American family’s Easter Sunday celebration. The good news for Universal and Amblin is Easter Sunday was a modest bet, carrying a price tag of US$17 million.
DC League of Super-Pets, an animated offering from Warner Bros, nabbed second place with US$11.2 million. After 2 weeks, Super-Pets boasts a domestic gross of US$45.1 million — a disappointing result, given its US$90 million production budget. Under its new corporate owner, Warner Bros Discovery is looking to shake up its cinematic universe of DC Comics characters, a change of course that resulted in the company’s controversial decision this week to scrap Batgirl after the movie had been completed. Instead of debuting on HBO Max as originally planned or being retro-fitted for a theatrical run, the film will now become a tax write-down.
Universal’s Nope came in third with US$8.5 million. That brings the twisty UFO thriller from Jordan Peele to US$97.9 million at the domestic box office — an impressive result for a movie that, like Bullet Train, was not derived from some pre-existing piece of intellectual property. Disney and Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder and Universal and Illumination’s Minions: Rise of Gru rounded out the top 5, earning US$7.6 million and US$7.1 million, respectively. That brings the Thor sequel’s stateside total to US$316.1 million, while the Despicable Me spin-off has now earned US$334.6 million domestically.
In limited release, Bodies Bodies Bodies grossed US$226,526 on 6 screens in New York and Los Angeles, which came out to a US$37,754 per-screen average. The A24 horror film follows a group of rich 20-somethings at a hurricane party at a remote family mansion that becomes the locus of a lot of blood-letting. The ensemble cast features former SNL star Pete Davidson, The Hate U Give’s Amandla Stenberg and Borat 2 breakout Maria Bakalova.
On the milestone front, Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick supplanted Titanic as the seventh-biggest film ever at the domestic box office, earning US$662 million in ticket sales. The sequel, now in its eleventh week of release, added US$7 million to its total.
The domestic box office has experienced an impressive rebound in recent months — a resurgence fuelled by hits such as Top Gun: Maverick and Jurassic World: Dominion. The bad news for cinemas is that Bullet Train is the last big-budget, major studio film this summer and there is about to be a veritable desert when it comes to populist fare. Studio executives and cinema owners privately said that there will not be another blockbuster until Black Panther: Wakanda Forever opens on Nov 11. That is a long time to wait, particularly for an exhibition industry that is still trying to shake off the lingering impact of Covid closures and diminished attendance. REUTERS
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