Po and Paul Atreides were still going strong at the weekend box office, with Kung Fu Panda 4 and Dune: Part Two neck-and-neck at the top of the charts with $30 million and $29.1 million respectively.
DreamWorks Animation and Universal’s animated adventure flew past the $100 million mark this weekend, taking its domestic total to $107.7 million. The Jack Black-led Kung Fu Panda 4 also grossed a further $39.6 million overseas, where it hasn’t released in all major territories yet. It’s current 10-day global cume sits at $176.4 million.
It pipped Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two to the top spot. However, the Legendary-Warner Bros. sequel raced past a milestone of its own by becoming the first film of 2024 to clear the $200 million at the North American box-office.
The Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya headlined epic currently sits on $205.3 million at the domestic box-office, while a further $51.2 million from the overseas market took it’s worldwide figure to $494.7 million, easily surpassing the pandemic-affected $433 million gross of 2021’s Dune. Industry experts predict that the film could end its run well north of the $600 million mark, which would surely give Warner Bros. the impetus to greenlight Dune: Messiah.
Elsewhere, Mark Wahlberg’s canine-caper Arthur the King turned out to be a bit of a shaggy dog story, underperforming to the tune of $7.5 million for the weekend, while Blumhouse’s Imaginary held strong with $5.6 million and a running domestic total of $18.1 million.
They’re numbers that the critically-acclaimed Love Lies Bleeding could only dream of, with Rose Glass’ Kirsten Stewart-led body-building crime-thriller only able to lift $2.7 million as it expanded wide.
The next two weeks see the arrival of Sony’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (22/3) and Warner Bros. and Legendary’s Godxilla x Kong: The New Empire (29/3) to really test the staying power of the Panda and Paul.
Until then, let us know what you spent your ticket money on at the weekend by heading to our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
