In the age of coronavirus, the box office has been essentially nonexistent. There aren’t any new movies to rake in the cash, so the likes of Trolls World Tour and Invisible Man have been topping the box office. But retro favorites have proven popular in repertory drive-in screenings, which is why Jurassic Park and Jaws have returned to the top of the charts yet again.
Meanwhile, overseas, theaters are reopening with movies that are only just now arriving in international markets for the first time. That’s why Little Women has just now crossed $100 million at the international box office.
Deadline has the numbers from last weekend’s box office that have Jurassic Park and Jaws taking the top two spots on the chart respectively. Jurassic Park earned $517,000 from 230 screens while Jaws, which just celebrated its milestone 45th anniversary last weekend, followed close behind with $516,000 from 187 screens. If Jaws had more screens, the shark might have taken a bite out of the tyrannosaurus rex for the weekend.
The surprise box office victory by two Steven Spielberg classics comes after Trolls World Tour stayed in the number one spot for nine weekends in a row, followed by a recent resurgence of The Invisible Man taking the top spot. But as audiences get hungry for movies that make them feel good, classic library titles have started to garner a lot of attention. The rest of the Top 10 also includes, Back to the Future, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, and The Goonies, making Steven Spielberg the king of the drive-ins. Maybe we’ll even see some of the Indiana Jones movies popping up, because those have been playing at drive-ins a lot recently.
However, this kind of box office chart isn’t likely to last much longer. July will finally start to see new movies hitting theaters as they reopen. But right now, out of the top grossing 201 cinemas, 160 of them were drive-ins, but it remains to be seen if that will hold up once multiplexes open up their doors. After all, the few movie theaters open right now aren’t doing so well business-wise, with the highest earning $14,000. Of course, that may be based on the movies available rather than interest from audiences. The real test will be when movies like Mulan and Tenet start hitting theaters in late July.
Little Women Passes $100 Million Internationally
Internationally, movie theaters are opening sooner than the United States, especially in countries like Japan that were hit early by coronavirus and are recovering much sooner, or countries like Denmark that dealt with the situation swiftly and efficiently. Little Women earned $475,000 from 472 screens in 12 foreign markets.
Little Women just opened in Japan, earning $300,000, and it also recently opened in Denmark, where it landed another $170,000. Combined with the rest of the international box office, the global total for Little Women now stands at $209 million.
It’s not exactly the most exciting update, but this is the first time a major studio has reported theatrical box office numbers to The Hollywood Reporter since movie theaters shut down. With around 2,000 theaters reopening soon around the world, hopefully things are about to get better at the box office. Then again, with coronavirus cases still on the rise in many parts of the United States, maybe we shouldn’t get our hopes up just yet.
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