Nature is healing, and so, apparently, is Hollywood.
After a blockbuster international opening for F9 just a week ago, the Memorial Day weekend box office in the United States has got to be happy news for Hollywood executives. The weekend’s big winner is A Quiet Place Part II, which earned an estimated $48.4 million domestically, according to Comscore.
Disney’s Cruella is set to finish the weekend at number two, with an estimated $21.3 million. Both movies are in their opening weekends, and both opened wide in close to 4,000 theaters each. Note, too, that these numbers just cover the Friday-to-Sunday three-day weekend. Quiet Place should hit roughly $58.5 million after Monday tickets are factored in, and Cruella should go up to around $26.5 million,
The easy, immediate takeaway here is that people are increasingly excited about heading back to theaters. The overall weekend gross — which looks like it’ll hover around the $100 million range once all the tickets are counted — is still well below where the Memorial Day weekend box office has historically been. But it’s important to look at the big picture.
According to Box Office Mojo, pretty much every year since 2016 (not counting 2020, obviously) has hit or exceeded roughly $220 million. Meanwhile, the pandemic box office from exactly one year ago was measured, literally, in the hundreds of thousands. So the fact that we’re talking about a $100 million weekend now is nothing short of miraculous. People are going to the movies again.
But there’s more to this picture. As Variety‘s box office report notes, early estimates for A Quiet Place Part II pegged it opening with a Memorial Day weekend box office of around $30 million. It crushed that figure, with Monday’s latest estimate now suggesting it’ll finish with nearly double the early projections.
Cruella also merits a mention here. Unlike A Quiet Place, Disney’s latest released simultaneously in theaters and for home streaming via Disney+ Premium Access. That means people have the option of paying a bit more ($30) to watch Cruella at home, via Disney+ streaming. It’s pricier than a theater ticket, but Premium Access also lets people watch a movie at their convenience and with any number of people in the room. So it’s not a terrible deal, especially for the family audience this kind of movie is aiming to attract.
Premium Access sales aren’t factored into box office estimates, so Cruella‘s $20-plus million is a picture of the theatrical performance only. And that’s not a bad start at all for a movie that people could also opt into watching at home. There’s been a lot of grousing about new movies putting the theater business at risk when studios opt to make new releases available for streaming simultaneously.
The evidence is admittedly light at this point, but Cruella‘s solid opening weekend at least suggests that those fears may be unfounded. People are surely hungry to get back to theaters in general right now, but the Premium Access release clearly didn’t spell death for Cruella at the box office.
Of course, F9 had a truly massive opening just one week ago, with the international release in eight markets — including China, a major market, but not the U.S. — earning $164 million. That’s a Universal release, and the studio opted against a streaming release. But how much are individual ticket sales worth to a Disney versus the longer-term commitment of a streaming subscription, which Premium Access releases help to solidify?
That’ll be an ongoing question in the future post-pandemic world as Hollywood interests work to strike a balance between turning movie releases into public events while still giving people who would rather stay at home the opportunity to participate (and spend money to do it). For now, though, the Memorial Day weekend box office for 2021 — which many view as the unofficial start of the summer movies season — suggests people are increasingly ready to get back to the theater.