If you were to pit Sonic The Hedgehog and Buck, the dog from Chris Sanders' The Call Of The Wild, in a race against each other, we can all easily guess who would win. Buck may have some solid canine speed, but he's no match for a fictionalized Erinaceinae who defies the laws of physics when he gets fully amped up. In rankings, the box office chart reflects these results this weekend, as Jeff Fowler's Sonic The Hedgehog has now been number one two weeks in a row, but the game of selling tickets things were a lot closer than what would be expectations in a footrace.
Check out the numbers for the two movies, as well as the rest of the Top 10, but scoping out the chart below, and then join me after for analysis!
Following its record-breaking performance during its opening, Sonic The Hedgehog has quickly turned into a big hit – though it was a bit unclear yesterday if it was going to hold on to its box office crown. As you can see, the margin is less than $2 million, and it's actually possible that the final numbers could reveal a switch in the rankings, but for now we're calling the video game movie the winner of the weekend.
As far as second weekends go, Sonic The Hedgehog's performance wasn't over-the-top great, but it made enough money to hit some notable milestones. The 54.7 percent drop doesn't look amazing on paper, but the $26.3 million it made domestically in the last three days was enough to both push the blockbuster into nine digits in North America, and across $200 million internationally (to be precise, the number currently stands at $203.1).
It's a surprising turn of events given the less-than-stellar history of video game adaptations, but the folks at Paramount Pictures have to be thrilled. Not only has it received a warmer reception from critics than any other previous film based on a game, but audiences delivered it an "A" on CinemaScore. It's a touch shocking that the studio hasn't already announced some massive sequel plans, if not especially because the film's ending and post-credits scenes very much set up a follow-up feature.
It's doubtful that Sonic The Hedgehog will be winning the box office crown for a third weekend given what's coming up on Friday, but the movie could wind up making north of $150 million domestically before it's ready to head out of theaters.
Sonic The Hedgehog gets the attention that comes with being number one, but The Call Of The Wild did come close to snatching victory away from it. That being said, as far as being profitable, the feature still has a fairly significant distance to travel, like Buck going from California into the Yukon Territory. You might think that a movie that could get a lot of production value simply from shooting on-location wouldn't cost a whole lot, but the film had a bigger-than-normal budget because of the approach that was taken with the dog protagonist – which is to say the choice to use performance capture instead of a real animal.
While Cathy Yan's Birds of Prey (And The Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn) has been getting some negative press for its box office turnout, The Call Of The Wild is actually in a more dire situation given that it cost about $50 million to make and had a softer opening. Including numbers from overseas, the nature-centric drama has now made $40.2 million worldwide, and it will be an interesting title to track over the next few weeks, particularly as Disney, which released the film via its 20th Century arm, starts putting much more of its attention towards promoting Pixar's Onward, which is arriving in theaters at the start of next month.
The only other new wide release this weekend was William Brent Bell's Brahms: The Boy II, and while that's a movie that cost only $10 million to make, the higher-ups at STX Entertainment probably aren't too thrilled with it making just short of $6 million in its first three days and placing in fourth only $40,000 ahead of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah's Bad Boys For Life (which is in its fifth week). Surely expectations weren't tremendously high, as we have to remember that the movie's predecessor, Brent Bell's The Boy, only made about $75 million when it launched back in 2016, but that title also made back its full budget in its opening weekend. There is still a chance that it will wind up being profitable, but I also don't expect that we'll be seeing the title appear on the Top 10 chart past the first weekend in March.
We'll also give some special attention to Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, which got a significant re-release from Neon last week following its amazing Best Picture win at the Academy Awards. People's curiosity about the movie led it to be the seventh most popular title in North America last weekend, and with just a 45.1 percent drop this time around it's still holding on at the bottom of the chart. It's likely that it will pass $50 million domestically in the next few days – a rather amazing feat for a foreign language title – and it has now made $204.6 million globally.
In the milestone department, Sam Mendes' 1917 is holding on in the middle of the pack in the Top 10, and it has now made over $150 million from ticket sales on this continent. Internationally it is close to making $350 million.
Coming up next weekend we will be saying goodbye to February 2020 (though it's an extra day longer thanks to it being a leap year), and that farewell will include only one new movie in wide release. That being said, it's an anticipated one, as Leigh Whannell's The Invisible Man could wind up posting some solid numbers if all goes well. We'll be tracking it throughout the week, and writing about the final box office results next Sunday, so stay tuned here on CinemaBlend!
