‘Black Panther’ seems unstoppable at this point. In its fifth weekend, the Marvel movie managed to stay on top, besting video game adaptation ‘Tomb Raider’. Taking in $27 million this weekend, ‘Black Panther’ is the second fastest movie to hit the $600M mark at the domestic box office trailing just behind ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’, which achieved that honor after 12 days.
‘Tomb Raider’ took in $23.5M, following more closely along the lines of Angelina Jolie’s second installment, ‘The Cradle of Life’ than the more successful first film, which still holds the honor of being the highest opening video game movie ever. Unfortunately, Alicia Vikander lacks Jolie’s star power and wasn’t enough to draw audiences. Also, like ‘The Cradle of Life’, the new ‘Tomb Raider’ is only falling in the middle when it comes to reaction. It only managed a “B” CinenaScore and a 70% PosTrak score. Critics were not kinder– ‘Tomb Raider’ ranks at 49% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The film has done better overseas. It’s already made $100M on a budget of roughly $90M. $41M came from China alone. So like a lot of other action movies, ‘Tomb Raider’ isn’t really reliant on the American audience. Reportedly, the break-even point for this movie is $275M. With the foreign market, this could make it.
The biggest surprise this weekend was the huge success of faith based ”I Can Only Imagine’, which like most religious movies relied heavily on grassroots marketing. It worked! This film opened at #3, topping the much higher profile ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ and Greg Berlanti’s gay teen drama ‘Love, Simon’.
Next week another bigger budget film is opening which may take the top spot from ‘Black Panther’… but we’ll see. ‘Pacific Rim’ was only a modest hit in 2013. Can its sequel, ‘Pacific Rim Uprising’ fare better?
Another potential hit is ‘Sherlock Gnomes’. There hasn’t really been a movie for little kids in a while, so this could benefit from that drought.