Paramount’s new action-comedy Novocaine may have had a fantastic opening weekend, rising to number one at the box office. But it can’t entirely kill the pain of the dismal overall picture this weekend.
The Dan Berk and Robert Olsen (Significant Other) film, starring Jack Quaid as a man named Nathan Caine who can’t feel pain, has earned $8.7 million since its Friday premiere, overtaking Bong Joon Ho‘s sci-fi fantasia Mickey 17, which fell a precipitous 60% in its second week of release. The highly anticipated follow-up to his Oscar-winning Parasite has so far grossed $33.2 million domestically on a $118 million budget.
Though Mickey 17‘s international numbers go a long way to rescue the film from financial cataclysm ($23 million this weekend has raised the film’s international gross to $90.4 million), the film’s failure to perform domestically is representative of the larger picture at the box office this weekend. Novocaine‘s triumph is still one of the weakest debuts at the top of the box office since the height of the pandemic, and the overall domestic haul of $52 million (per Comscore) ranks this weekend among the slowest of the year so far. The metrics and analytics company is also reporting that this week’s year-to-date revenues are down nearly 5 percent from where they were last year and close to 38 percent of what they were in 2019.
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Mickey 17 dethroned Captain America: Brave New World last weekend, which had held on to the top spot three weeks running. This week, Anthony Mackie‘s first starring turn as the patriotic powerhouse since Chris Evans‘ departure after Avengers: Endgame fell to the fourth spot, with Steven Soderbergh‘s Black Bag ranking third in its first week in release.
The star-studded spy thriller grossed $7.5 million this weekend, coming in just $10,000 shy of the silver medal. Rounding out the top five on the domestic chart is The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, which earned just over $3 million.
As is often the case, the international and global pictures tell a slightly altered version of the same story, with Mickey 17, Black Bag, and Brave New World still holding onto the Nos. 2, 3, and 4 spots at $23 million, $11.7 million, and $11.5 million international weekend grosses, respectively. But expanding the frame of the world, Novocaine falls to the fifth spot, with a $10.5 million weekend gross. The international title holder for the eighth consecutive week is the animated Chinese film Ne Zha 2, which added a whopping $26.4 million this weekend to its coffers, amassing over $2 billion so far.
Ne Zha 2‘s uncontested dominance in its third month of release is even more impressive considering it is only showing in eight territories. Compare that to Brave New World‘s 53 (it has so far earned $388.5 million cumulatively at the international box office) and Mickey 17‘s 70 (it has only earned $90.4 million).
The bottom half of this weekend’s top 10 domestic earners represent a diverse array films with respect to genre, budget, and distribution method. The independently produced Christian film The Last Supper, which features no major stars, earned the sixth spot, ahead of Paddington in Peru, in its fifth week in release, the animated DreamWorks film Dog Man, in its seventh week in release, NEON horror film from Longlegs director Osgood Perkins The Monkey, and underwater disaster film Last Breath. Each of these films earned between $2.3 and $2.8 million at the box office this weekend.
Claudette Barius/Focus Features
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While Last Breath and The Last Supper (the latter only had a North American release) didn’t rank internationally, Paddington, The Monkey, and Dog Man snatched the seventh, eighth, and ninth places, respectively.
The Day the Earth Blew Up came in 10th at the international box office with $3.3 million this weekend, while Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy continues to do great business in the U.K., earning the sixth spot in its fourth week in release. The fourth entry in the Renée Zellweger rom-com series grossed $5.6 million this weekend, leading to a $120.6 million cumulative total.
Several films with that potentially high-earning X-factor hit theaters next weekend, from the scandal-ridden Snow White live-action remake to Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins horror two-hander Locked and the even more controversial bodybuilding film Magazine Dreams. The film earned star Jonathan Majors the best notices of his career when it premiered at Sundance in 2023 but took over two years to release, given Majors’ arrest on charges of strangulation, assault, and harassment that March.