The American box office is healing. From March of last year until April of this year, we didn’t have anything that came close to resembling a blockbuster at the domestic market. Our highest grossing movie until April 2021 was Tenet, which finished with $58.4M (The Croods: A New Age caught up to also gross $58.4M just this week as it finishes its run). However, Tenet would have made closer to $175M in normal times. That being said, it fared a good bit better overseas, grossing $305.2M.

Those totals weren’t topped until Warner Bros. released Godzilla Vs. Kong and it rampaged its way to $338.9M overseas, with it still having to open in Japan, where it has a July release date. GvK has so far taken in $99.1M domestically, and I once thought it would be our first movie since February of 2020 to cross the $100M milestone. It won’t be.

GvK only brought in $500,000 this past weekend, and will surely drop another 40+ percent, as WB/HBO Max opens In The Heights in theaters and continues to market Conjuring 3 as well. GvK *will* soon crawl to $100M, but after A Quiet Place 2, which will soar past the number this weekend.

So yeah, we’re about to finally see a movie clear one of our oldest and truest box office milestones, right before a movie from a couple months ago (barely) does it too! There’s also a good chance the movie opening this weekend, In The Heights, could be the next movie to do so, and we all know Fast and Furious 9 will zoom zoom past that marker. Black Widow absolutely should make that and more if it doesn’t end up as a massive outlier for the MCU. That’s insanely unlikely since their lowest grossing film in the U.S. is 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, which took in $134.8M. That was way back when the MCU was just getting going, though, and most people didn’t even know Incredible Hulk was connected to Iron Man (heck, some still forget it’s part of the MCU!).

AQP2 already has $90.7M following a $19.3M second weekend and a $2.3M second Monday. Before it even gets to its third weekend frame, the sequel should have ~$96M. And there’s no way the movie is going to make less than $4M on weekend three. Even if it falls hard with a 50% drop, that’s still over $9M, which takes it to $105M+. That will make it the first movie to do so since Sonic The Hedgehog achieved that number on February 23rd of 2020. Sonic ended with $148.9M from a $57M opening, although its run was cut a *little* short due to the pandemic, and was absolutely going to cross $150M.

Anyway, my point is: nature is healing. We owe a big thank you to John Krasinski and Paramount for opening A Quiet Place Part II exclusively in theaters. And another big thank you to WB, Universal, and other smaller studios for releasing movies the last ten months to keep some money coming in. They kept the lights on. Movies such as Solstice Studios’ Unhinged (which starred Russell Crowe and was the first movie to open wide in the pandemic), Tenet, and even The Croods: A New Age may not have saved theaters, but they sure as heck helped. We wouldn’t be back to the movies without them testing the waters.

Published by Seth Dayrich

Founder of WSYS and writer of two motion pictures (Catching Summer, Dan's Humongous Apartment) and a play (The Restaurant Tango). View all posts by Seth Dayrich