‘Marksman’ Tops Weekend Box Office With Just $2 Million

The Croods: A New Age and Promising Young Woman are displaying terrific legs despite being concurrently available on PVOD.

In domestic box office news, Liam Neeson’s The Marksman is the top movie for the second and presumably final weekend. The Open Road-released actioner earned $2.1 million (-32%) in weekend two for a $6.16 million ten-day domestic cume. This is obviously well below what would be expected from even a lower-end Neeson actioner, whose films tended to open with between $11 million and $13 million over the last several years.

As far as comparisons to Honest Thief, the other PG-13, Open Road-distributed, pandemic-era Liam Neeson action movie from just three months ago, it has smaller numbers (a $4.1 million debut, a $2.3 million second-weekend, a $7.4 million ten-day cume) but thus far better legs (a 32% drop versus a 43% drop). We should expect The Marksman to end up essentially tied with Honest Thief’s $14 million domestic (and $30 million global) cume.

I have to assume Open Road is okay with that, since they announced The Marksman after they saw how Honest Thief had performed. At the very least the revived distributor is earning brownie points with the major theater chains. Neeson keeps threatening to retire from action movies, but I hope he can do one last round with Jaume Collet-Serra before he clocks out.

Universal and DreamWorks’ The Croods: A New Age earned $1.82 million in its ninth domestic weekend, falling just 9% from last weekend and bringing its domestic cume to $41.835 million. That’s still below the $43 million opening weekend of The Croods back in 2013, and its $139.7 million global cume (with more markets set for Easter) is only halfway decent because it only cost $65 million. However, the animated sequel has earned a whopping 4.3x its $9.7 million Fri-Sun Thanksgiving debut (out of a $14 million Wed-Sun launch).

That’s not a post-Covid record in terms of multipliers, Tenet earned 6.17x its $9.4 million Fri-Sun debut (out of a long $20.4 million Labor Day week launch) and The War With Grandpa has earned $19.47 million from a $3.6 million debut (5.37x), but it’s pretty impressive considering the absurd circumstances. The film has earned $41 million domestic while being available on PVOD for the last month. I can’t speak to the actual revenue earned on PVOD, but I have to imagine there is a future for $45-$75 million “tentpoles” that do “meh” theatrical business and halfway decent PVOD figures.

Sony’s Monster Hunter passed $10 million this weekend, and to be fair the choice to release it now was mostly based in the hope that it would break big in China. But then it got pulled in China over allegations of racially-insensitive dialogue. Tom Hanks’ News of the World has now earned $9.65 million as it continues to soar on PVOD. Meanwhile, Deon Taylor’s Fatale has quietly earned $5.3 million domestic as it too co-exists on PVOD.

Ditto Promising Young Woman, which dropped just 10% this weekend for a $400,000 gross and a $3.979 million domestic total. The film is slowly crawling up the various VOD charts (it’s fourth on both Google and FandangoNow). It is, like several of the above-noted flicks, a film that curious folks would have seen in theaters if it were possible/safe to do so. The Carey Mulligan-starring rape revenge dramady was never going to be a blockbuster, but it’ll probably stick around if it ends up in the Oscar season conversation.

The closest thing to a “major” new release this weekend was Our Friend. The Gravitas Ventures release earned $250,000 in 543 theaters in its debut weekend. Even in better times, I wouldn’t expect a dramady about a guy (Jason Segal) who becomes indispensable to his friend’s (Casey Affleck) family as that friend’s wife (Dakota Johnson) slowly dies from cancer, to break out. That said, the well-reviewed (83% on Rotten Tomatoes) release will expand into 750 locations next week and could become a VOD curiosity in due time.