Weekend Box Office: ‘SpongeBob’ Nabs $900K In Canada As ‘Unhinged’ Tops $8M Worldwide

The Tax Collector, the weekend’s top U.S. grosser, has earned $5 million in eight days of VOD release.

If you live in Canada, you had the opportunity to see both Solstice Studios’ Unhinged and Paramount’s The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge On the Run in theaters. The Nickelodeon toon was initially scheduled for global release over Memorial Day (May 22) before being moved to August 7 and then being pulled from theaters in favor of a PVOD release sometime next year. However, since Canadians seem to be handling the pandemic better than Americans, they’ll A) get Chris Nolan’s Tenet on the week of August 26 along with much of the world and B) got the third SpongeBob movie in theaters this very weekend. Sponge On the Run opened with $900,000 in 300 theaters this weekend, making it the biggest Fri-Sun domestic (North America) debut since theaters closed in March.

Yes, that’s a bigger launch than the $403,852 Fri-Sun opening of IFC’s The Rental four weekends ago and the $611,000 opening in July for a reissue of The Empire Strikes Back in early July. Alas, we’re still waiting on the season’s first $1 million-plus launch, but hopefully that’ll arrive next weekend when Unhinged and the 10th anniversary release of Inception arrive in American theaters. For referencing, The SpongeBob Square Pants Movie opened in November of 2004 with $32 million in 3,212 theaters before legging out to $85 million domestic and $140 million worldwide on a $30 million budget. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water would open in February of 2015 with $55 million for an eventual $163 million domestic and $325 million worldwide cume on a $74 million budget.

Even sans the pandemic, it was possible that the third SpongeBob movie would end up grossing closer to the first film than the second. That’s partially thanks to VOD and streaming offering a deluge of kid-friendly movies and TV shows, including old SpongeBob Squarepants shows and movies, at the click of a button. Although to be fair, it’s hard to argue that SpongeBob and friends aren’t “marquee characters” even if they aren’t on the theatrical scale of Buzz and Woody or Anna and Elsa. Nonetheless, the same coin toss commercial scenario that resulted in Trolls: World Tour (a sequel to the liked but not beloved $346 million-grossing Trolls) and Scoob! (just another animated Scooby-Doo movie among over 35 direct-to-home titles since 1998) led Paramount to send SpongeBob 3 to PVOD.

While Unhinged won’t open domestically until next Friday, which will allegedly see the major chains (AMC, Regal, Cinemark, etc.) reopening in America for the first time since mid-March, it has been slowly playing overseas for the last few weeks. The Russell Crowe-starring road rage thriller, about a young woman terrorized by a sociopath after she chews him out over a traffic conflict, was positioned as the first wide release for reopening theaters back when we all hoped theaters would reopen in July. The film earned $562,000 in 299 Canadian locations for a $1.949 per-theater average. That brings the $33 million-budgeted film’s global cume to around $8 million (with half the world left to go) since opening in Germany on July 16. Still, the film’s commercial prospects would have been iffy in ideal circumstances.

Russell Crowe hasn’t opened a big movie by himself since Robin Hood ($37 million in 2010), while most of his big post-Gladiator movies were two-handers (American Gangster with Denzel Washington, 3:10 to Yuma with Christian Bale, both in 2007) or supporting roles (Man of Steel in 2013, Les Miserables in 2012 and The Mummy in 2017). He’s absolutely an added-value element, but even Robin Hood wasn’t a “hit” ($300 million on a $200 million budget). His last star-vehicle success was arguably Cinderella Man back in 2005. Unhinged is exactly the kind of movie gets ignored by the very moviegoers complaining that Hollywood never makes original movies for adults. Even if Unhinged plays to empty auditoriums, it still puts newbie Solstice Studios in good graces with NATO and the related major theater chains.

Nonetheless, while I think I’m still under review embargo, I can say that A) the movie delivers on its elevator pitch and B) you should not watch the last trailer as it gives away many of the big money shots. It’s destined for a place in the movie trivia history books no matter how well it fares in American and/or overseas theaters, which was somewhat the point of moving up its theatrical release from (initially) September to July. And, yeah, it could easily score the first $1 million-plus opening for a new movie since mid-March presuming anyone shows up next weekend. Of course, that honor could go to Inception, which would be ironic considering the whole “Chris Nolan brings folks back to the movies” narrative that’s been dissected and debated all summer.  

In American box office news, David Ayer’s The Tax Collector earned another $203,722 in 138 theaters for a $634,145 ten-day domestic cume. That’s a halfway decent 34% drop even with nine more theaters in play, but it does mean that, barring a massive comedown next weekend, it should join Trolls: World Tour, Relic, The Wretched and The Rental as the few/the proud new movies to earn over $1 million domestic since theaters closed in March. Moreover, RLJE Films’ crime melodrama, starring Bobby Soto, Shia LaBeouf and George Lopez, has earned over $5 million in the first eight days of VOD release, again topping the charts on iTunes, Google Play and (as of this moment) FandangoNow. Simply put, that’s an unusually high number for a VOD title.