RankTitleDomestic Gross (Weekend)Worldwide Gross (Cume)Week #Percentage ChangeBudget1Shazam!$25,140,000$221,213,0132-53.0%$100M2Little$15,499,000$17,399,0001N/A$20M3Hellboy (2019)$12,015,000$12,015,0001N/A$50M4Pet Sematary (2019)$10,000,000$76,821,6602-59.2%$21M5Dumbo (2019)$9,186,000$266,945,1623-49.6%$170MNotable Box Office StoriesShazam! - While the weekend was lead by an exclamation mark it was one of the more dull weekends of the year. Ss we enter the pre-Avengers doldrums we see how hard it is to compete with even pre-sales of the massive film as while Shazam did maintain #1 it did so on weak weekend, coming in with $25.1M. Of the four new releases, two didn't even make the top 5 and Shazam's main competition, Hellboy, completely fell apart. All that in mind the 53% drop for the film on its second weekend is not a great sign for a film that opened low and was hoping to ride that A rating on Cinemascore for a great three weekends in a row. As it continues to struggle internationally the film really needed to pick up steam domestically but it seems while critics and audiences like the film there's just no push to go see it right. Of course as mentioned we are past Endgame breaking the pre-sale ticket records and even worse the final season of Game of Thrones began on Sunday and looks to eat into five more straight weeks of box office. But more than that there's just not the right energy around Shazam. This should be the fun early summer movie to rally people around but it seems unlikely to get anywhere near the healthy long run it needs, even to justify its lower than normal $100M budget.Little - Don't call your movie Little! What are you, demanding for puns from hack box office writers? Anyways Little didn't even make enough or lose enough for a decent pun as it opened fine at #2 with $15.4M. The film is your classic body swap comedy, this time focusing on a black woman (Regina Hall) in the adult who's gotta be a kid to learn a lesson role. Hollywood's gone hard for black female led comedies post Girls Trip, evidenced that this almost Big remake follows the direct black female led remake What Men Want which happened to close the same week. Body swap comedies aren't big money openers, so what you want is a Freaky Friday (2003) situation where you open to $22.2M but end with $110M. Little is very unlikely to pull that off but as the only notable counter-programming slate for a while as it has absolutely no direct comedy competition until The Hustle opens in May. The film was not well received critically but it did get an okay B+ rating on Cinemascore which may mean a decent run. It's really more seeing if the core audience returns and brings friends but as of now with a $20M budget this seems like a decent earning programmer that we will all forget existed in like...what was I talking about?Hellboy (2019) - Somewhere right now Guillermo del Toro has a sly grin on his face as he reads the trades that the reboot to his Hellboy film franchise, called very creatively Hellboy, has totally bombed opening at #3 with $12M. This is reddit so I don't need to relitigate this whole thing so here's the brief summary of the Hellboy '19 saga. Guillermo del Toro's big passion project in the mid 2000s was the Hellboy franchise, a series of two films based on the popular comic book of the same name starring Ron Perlman as the big red boi. Hellboy 1 was a financial disappointment but growing interest from TV streams got a more flashy second film produced. That film opened well and was very well received but had horrendous scheduling. It opened the week before the #1 film on /r/movies all years running list, The Dark Knight. It dropped 70% the second week and GDT spent the next decade trying to get a third made to no success. While he was promoting his Best Picture winner The Lady From Paddington Gets it On With a Fish it was announced with major surprise that Hellboy was to be rebooted with David Harbor replacing Perlman and Neil Marhsall taking the role of director. The film was to be a gory R-rated tribute to the comics. And then everything went wrong.Hellboy (2019) (cont.) - The Wrap wrote a fantastic piece on the troubled Hellboy shoot and it's quite a ride. Essentially the film was a nightmare shoot, a constant battle between a horror director wanting to make a dark movie versus a studio who wanted their own Deadpool. The film's budget faced a massive downgrade from the previous entry, from $85M to $50M. And the results were not too pleasant. The film was trashed by critics and got a C rating on Cinemascore. The film had the worst wide release opening for a comic book adaptation since 2014's Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. And it seems no one involved in the production or out of it left happy. It all reminds me so much of The Predator from last year, a hobbled mess where a person who's made great work in genre before cannot face the battles of studio mandates and maybe his own self-interests. While I certainly think the terrible reviews hurt the opening it's also a sign of just how bad an idea the reboot was to begin with. Not only did it piss off a major talent who just won Best Director, it annoyed fans of the original who likely stayed away. And it showed that Hellboy still is a very cult figure and selling people on seeing him with taglines like "Legendary AF" is a difficult task. This isn't to say a GDT directed Hellboy 3 would have faired better box office wise, but at least one person would have won a cinematic battle instead of seemingly no one.After - What a world we live in where reworked fan fiction has become the new money maker. Thanks Fifty Shades you broke the world. Well at least this time it didn't work as After, which no joke is based on One Direction fan fiction, flopped opening at #8 with $6.2M. The film however is doing better overseas with a worldwide total of $18.5M. On a budget of $14M the film doesn't have to do a lot to get to profitability, especially since the film was mostly target marketed on social media sites like Instagram and YouTube (I know this old man hadn't heard of it until he made the official discussion thread). However its very existence has brought up some rather odd issues, like does a fan fiction based on a real person that then changes the names count as some form of personal slander or copyright infringement? I'm clearly no smarty smart lawyer but I can say this trend will eventually bite someone in the ass somewhere. After is too small scale to be the test case but I can't imagine Scar Jo will like my new film project about famed actor turned goth vampire hunter Jar Sco.Missing Link - Oh poor Laika. The company is trying to keep stop motion animated films alive with well reviewed insanely detailed works and the thanks they get is one of the worst wide release openings of all time as Missing Link opened to a dismal #9 with $5.8M. That's the 11th worst opening for a film in over 3,000 theaters, being beaten by such classics as The Darkest Minds and Show Dogs. While I think the general public disinterest in stop motion is what has kept some of their films in the past from succeeding this time I place the blame solely on the utter lack of marketing. The film was barely marketed and many people I know who are Laika fans didn't even know the film existed when it came out this weekend. This is the first Laika film release by United Artists instead of Focus and there is a clear lack of engagement from them on this film or at very least a poorly managed release strategy. Not that I ever saw this film, which got decent reviews but feels like a modest follow-up to the epic scope of their previous film Kubo and the Two Strings, doing incredibly well but with such an awful opening any good will is moot. For once this is actually a company I do want bought up by Disney just to keep them safe. Oh what's that Disney has bought Laika and they are making them do a stop motion animated BB-8 movie? What have I wrought?!Films Reddit Wants to FollowThis is a segment where we keep a weekly tally of currently showing films that aren't in the Top 5 that fellow redditors want updates on. If you'd like me to add a film to this chart, make a comment in this thread.TitleDomestic Gross (Weekly)Domestic Gross (Cume)Worldwide Gross (Cume)BudgetWeek #Bohemian Rhapsody$76,588$216,217,834$901,417,909$52M24Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse$178,764$190,241,310$374,765,068$90M18Alita: Battle Angel$243,591$85,390,093$403,519,771$170M9Captain Marvel$16,462,018$386,536,581$1,064,536,581$152M6Us$17,969,430$163,498,425$235,998,425$20M4Notable Film ClosingsTitleDomestic Gross (Cume)Worldwide Gross (Cume)BudgetThe Wandering Earth$5,875,487$700,316,479$50MMary Poppins Returns$171,958,438$349,063,035$130MVice$47,836,282$73,609,348$60MIf Beale Street Could Talk$14,915,773$20,506,995$12MThe Favourite$34,366,783$95,716,655$15MRalph Breaks the Internet$201,091,711$528,321,547$175MWhat Men Want$54,611,903$71,220,392$20MGlass$111,035,005$246,908,596$20MHappy Death Day 2U$28,051,045$64,234,257$9MA Dog's Way Home$42,004,346$74,834,817$18MAs always r/boxoffice is a great place to share links and other conversations about box office news.Also you can see the archive of all Box Office Week posts at r/moviesboxoffice (which have recently been updated).My Letterboxd: http://bit.ly/2rSmMyn via /r/movies http://bit.ly/2ZgPWq2
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