The box-office played out as predicted over the weekend, although DC League of Super-Pets wasn’t a pedigree performer, taking the #1 spot with a low-end of expectations $23M debut.
With the vocal talents of Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart and Natasha Lyonne, DC League of Super-Pets (read our ★★★ review here) underwhelmed to the tune of $23M, which is comparable to Universal’s The Bad Guys, which opened with a million more back in April on its way to a $96.7M domestic gross, all without the brand recognition of the DC film. The Justice League animation also roped in $41.4M overseas for a running total of $61.4M. Even Lightyear buzzed higher than that at the box-office.
In the runner up spot was Nope, which fell in line with most horror films and dropped a steep 58% for an $18.5M weekend. However, Nope isn’t just a horror film, it’s a Jordan Peele film, and with that comes comparisons with his first two blockbuster performers. Us fell 53% from its $71.1M opening weekend, whereas Get Out opened to $28M and had the legs to carry it towards $175M domestic cume.
The major difference here is that Peele’s latest is budgeted at almost $70M and word-of-mouth is nowhere near as strong as his previous films. Having said that, Nope’s domestic tally stands at an impressive 10-day total, and with a mid-August international roll-out on the horizon, as long as Universal don’t do anything silly and release it on VOD for those pesky pirates to take advantage of, it will still go down as another success for the director.
Elsewhere Thor: Love and Thunder crossed the $300M mark at the North American box-office, and in doing so inched close to Ragnarok‘s lifetime gross of $315M, while Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone became the most successful horror film of 2022 by dialling into an $83.1M total.
As always the stats and statistics can be found over at BoxOfficeMojo…
