By Well, the Aladdin remake is in a whole new world of box office then anyone expected. And you’re about to punch me through the Internet because I’m just going to make terrible Aladdin-based puns for the rest of this post.
With way more than one step ahead of the rest of the films this Memorial Day weekend Aladdin pulled in a whopping $112.7 million, beating its high end expectations of $100 million. Strength of ten regular films, indeed! It looks like audience were perfectly fine despite the tepid critical response. Maybe they ain’t never had a friend like Aladdin, and just couldn’t keep away from the catchy songs. Any fears that Disney’s live-action efforts were beginning to wear thin after Dumbo bombed should be readily assuaged. Looks like that was more about the lack of awareness of the classic film than people getting bored of these movies.
The other two films that opened this weekend, Brightburn and Booksmart, didn’t fare as well. Brightburn was able to pull in $9.5 million, which given its budget and the dominance Aladdin had isn’t terrible, but the response to it has been poor so it’s not going to last long. Meanwhile, the absolutely fantastic Booksmart had a tough climb with only $8.7 million coming in. That’s not horrendous but with such positive buzz and little counter programming in the raunchy coming-of-age arena the studios were hoping for more.
Overall, it was a pretty mediocre Memorial Day weekend, and that’s with some holdover movies like John Wick 3 pulling some solid weight. There’s plenty of other blockbusters coming this summer, and it wasn’t a terrible box office weekend so no worries on the decline of all cinema… yet.
Note, numbers here are for the two day weekend gross.
1. Aladdin – $90,400,000
2. John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum – $24,600,000
3. Avengers: Endgame – $17,226,000
4. Pokémon Detective Pikachu – $13,395,000
5. Brightburn – $7,865,000
6. Booksmart – $6,942,347
7. A Dog’s Journey – $4,150,000
8. The Hustle – $3,812,554
9. The Intruder – $2,300,000
10. Long Shot – $1,640,000
