I'll wait for the actual number before talking about record-breaking stuffs but I think it's fair to say, at least in North America, that cinema is back! Very strong non-holiday weekend for all movies, very healthy box office. Now the remaining question is will it sustain throughout the year...

M3Gan's already grossed 4X its budget globally after 3 days so expect we'll be seeing her again for much of this decade. I'd love a M3Gan and Ex Machina cross over eventually too.

Great weekend indeed. Now can we stop with the short fucking windows already? It's not necessary.

2023 is looking to be the first normal boxoffice year since 2019.

Indeed. The boxoffice is returning to normalcy. Still, when you look at the films in the #5-10 spot on a given weekend, there are still way more sub-$1M grosses than what we saw pre-2020. Before 2020, the #10 movie on any weekend was around $3M (that's been the case since the 1990s actually)

M3GAN is now a bona fide horror franchise. Expect sequels, prequels, spin offs, etc. I feel like this will be the new Conjuring. Very timely considering how AI is becoming part of the public conversation (Chat GPT and all that).

Good hold for Avatar. With some luck it will reach $650M~. Impressive run considering the soft opening and that it's been 13 years since the original. I think this shows audiences are actually digging the sequel big time and that should mean good things for Part 3.

The Whitney biopic bombing this hard is still flabbergasting to me. It won't even come $10M close to the unadjusted gross of the Tina Turner biopic from 1993, and Whitney had a much bigger career than Tina. Maybe it's because her story is a tragedy about drug addiction leading to death so no one wanted to sit through a downer (despite what the trailers tried to showcase), vs Tina whose story is one of overcoming abuse.

Avatar is racing towards $700m with that hold. With MLK weekend next week and President's Day weekend late in its run - it's looking strong. The only thing that may curtail it's late run is the onslaught of strong product in the March/April corridor.

Super happy for M3GAN! Mighty impressive weekend that should lead to a $100m. When horror films hit, they really hit and legs become superb. Amazing for a genre known for big second weekend drops.

Here's a cool bit of trivia, I believe this may be the first time in at least 22 years the top 10 for the first 3 day of Jan is currently higher than the 3day for previous year's New Year's weekend. I saw Mojo had the first weekend of Jan 2001 above the last of Dec 2000, however two movies weren't listed the weekend earlier (Dude Where's My Car and Dracula) so record could very well be even earlier if at all.

Whoa! Sensational for M3GAN. Over $30 million! I did not expect that at all.

Otto also did pretty good.

And I knew The Menu would eventually overtake Strange World. It has creeped up now and will do it within a few days. I'm glad for it.

Puss pulled a 19% drop with actuals and M3Gan went up $200K!

Another random bit of trivia, Avatar 2 is only the 3rd film for Kate Winslet to top $80M+ since Titanic. She had the two Divergent movies. Otherwise Avatar 2 is only her second movie to make over $151M+, joining Titanic.

Leo's only had 4 movies make $150M+ with the last one 8 years ago with The Revenant. His only two movies to make more than $185M+ are Inception and Titanic, which is his only $300M+ movie.

Seems like Leo needs to join Avatar 4 or 5. Having Kate and Leo and James tag team again could help Avatar 4/5 get even more event factor (like it needs any more). Still an easy way for Leo do make lots of $ and have a big mega blockbuster with Kate again.

I had no idea until this post that Kate was in Avatar 2 lol

and it GAINED an additional 138 theaters last weekend on it's 4th wknd.
wonder if that's common? where's O at

When you have lots of movies underperform and suck at the box office (non-Puss and Avatar holiday openers), once the theaters legal obligations were done they dumped them to show more Avatar.

We've had sucky box office runs since the dawn of cinema so sure this has happened before many times!

O - You called Puss in Boots success early, even during that underwhelming OW. How did you know?

That was around the same week I made the Whitney $150M club.

Holidays are very generous but the dailies were indicative early on of heavily depressed grosses for Puss. It's first Friday was much higher than it's opening day while Christmas was double. Even this past weekend, Puss' 18th day is still its 4th best day of its run and all three days of this past weekend are still all above Puss' 1st day. It's 4th weekend may be very close to its 1st.

Everyone already knows that the Way of Water has the second highest domestic grossing in the 4th weekend (excluding American Sniper, you know the reason).

But among all 41 films that report a grossing number for Jan 6-8 weekend to BoxOfficeMojo (39 for the-numbers), the Way of Water also has the second highest average gross per theatre ($10,561, more than 3 times of Puss in Boots's average) despite it has the most theatre (4,340), the only film that has higher average only has one theatre and it ranks in 29th.

Same here

Ahhhh got it. Well, good call!