Hey, Hollywood! Are you taking note? Good, strong, clean movies continue to (ahem) clean up at the box office.
For the third straight weekend, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie topped all comers at the box-office, collecting another $35 million worth of pixelated coins in the U.S. and Canada en route to its latest victory. All told, the film has earned more than $355.2 million in North America, and $747.5 million worldwide. That should be enough to buy an extra power star or two.
But Nintendo’s famous pair of plumbers aren’t the only ones exploring the upper echelons of the box office galaxy. Project Hail Mary’s cinematic rocket ship continues to soar as well. The Ryan Gosling vehicle earned another $20.5 million this weekend stateside, pushing its own total gross to $285.1 million. Toss in another $288 million in overseas earnings, and Project Hail Mary has banked a stellar $573.1 million.
Oh, and Project Hail Mary continues to hold surprisingly strong, losing just 15% of its weekend-over-weekend audience. In its five weeks of release, the film hasn’t slipped lower than No. 2. This astrophage-powered film doesn’t look like it’ll astro-fade anytime soon.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy proved to be the weekend’s biggest newcomer, but let’s be honest: This R-rated horror flick was buried by the competition, earning just $13.5 million domestically and $34 million worldwide. (It’s an illustration that gross films don’t necessarily gross a lot, financially speaking.) Sure, the film could have an unexpected surge in the weeks to come. But from where we sit today, this looks like a wrap for The Mummy.
The Drama finished in fourth place with $4.8 million, finishing about a million ahead of fifth-place You, Me & Tuscany ($3.8 million). Another family friendly flick, Hoppers, took home sixth place with $2.9 million.
Another newcomer, the R-rated thriller Normal, finished seventh with just under $2.7 million—a fittingly unremarkable finish for a film with such an unremarkable name.
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Cronin-Mummy’s reviews, both critical and commercial, were also rather tepid, which I’d say will have a lot more impact on box-office returns than cleanliness of content. (Super Mario Galaxy is performing “well,” and deservedly so in my opinion, but doesn’t seem to be making as much money as quickly as its predecessor did, and I’d speculated that lower audience approval ratings might have been a cause.) The Passion of the Christ was an extremely strong box-office performer but could hardly be called “clean” – nor, I presume, Deadpool 3, whose domestic take shattered The Passion’s record.
Finally rented one battle after another from the library and definitely didn’t think it was nearly the masterpiece there will be blood, punch drunk love or the master are. Sean Penn gave a great performance and there was some touching scenes here and there, but overall it was a whacked out crazy you know what of a movie. Crazy characters in crazy situations acting well off the wall. Hard to care for anyone really in this what did I just see kind of movie. I saw it finally, but I’d only give it a five out of ten to be nice. PTA has done way better in the past.