#box-office

#box-office

The King's Warden has rewritten box-office benchmarks, earning over £70m to become the top-grossing film in the country's history, according to The Korea Herald.

Kirsten Dunst gave an interview to Town and Country Magazine declaring that while she was still committed to doing smaller movies, she'd love to do a movie like Minecraft 2, 'because her kids loved the first one and because she'd like to make a pile of cash. Maybe I can just make a movie where I don't lose money?'

After its $45.3 million debut, The Walt Disney Co.'s 'Hoppers' release dipped a modest 37% in its follow-up weekend, a promising sign for an animated movie hoping to have strong legs through March. The Pixar original, about a young woman who transforms into the body of a beaver to help defend a pond from development, is hoping to keep attracting audiences with good reviews (94% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) and strong audience scores (an 'A' CinemaScore).

After a better-than-expected opening weekend in theaters, box office for Amazon's "Melania" fell 67%, to $2.37 million, in its second weekend. The documentary about First Melania Trump has grossed a total of $13.5 million so far (almost all of that in the United States), which means it's extremely unlikely the film - which Amazon spent $40 million to acquire and $35 million to market - will break even in theaters.

In what seems to be the most uniting moment since Chardonnay was invented, older white Republican women flocked to movie theaters this past weekend to watch Melania, the nearly two-hour-long documentary about the First Lady financed by Jeff Bezos and directed by accused sex pest Brett Ratner. The film allegedly follows her during the 20 days leading up to Trump's second inauguration in 2025, though the trailer basically just showed her wearing sunglasses.

Instead, the big success story was , a new film directed by Mark Fischbach, better known as the popular YouTuber Markiplier. Inspired by the 2022 horror game created by David Szymanski, Iron Lung was made for $3m and has made $21m to date, Impressively, the film also reigned supreme over Sam Raimi's new horror comedy Send Help, starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien.

The 2026 box office is up and running with Sam Raimi and someone from YouTube topping the weekend charts. But the people are still heading out to see the likes of Marty Mauser, Judy Hopps, and the late-2025 contingent of films. Both and Avatar: Fire and Ash continue to add on to their exorbitant box-office totals, making me wonder if we should add one more bonus threshold next year for $400 million. Will ponder!

Family might be forever, but the Fast & Furious saga doesn't have quite so much gas in the tank. After upping the ante for three decades, the biggest action franchise of the century has finally reached the end of the road. Back in 2020, star Vin Diesel announced that the Fast saga would conclude with a two-part finale. We got Fast X in 2023, and though its follow-up was meant to premiere in 2025, the franchise has hit a few snags along the way.

Nope, not " Melania" - though the sort-of-documentary about the first lady did do better than industry folks had projected, bringing in $7 million in its first weekend. The real hit of the weekend was made by someone you probably haven't heard of, unless you are a very specific kind of online person: " Iron Lung," a horror/sci-fi movie, written, directed by, and starring Mark Fischbach, known to his fans as Markiplier on YouTube, where he has 38.2 million subscribers.

Third-place opening weekends are not usually the stuff of box-office headlines, but on Saturday, you couldn't pick up your phone without reading that Melania, Brett Ratner's gauzy, glad-handing portrait of the first lady, was doing much better than expected. Deadline called its opening the strongest for a documentary in a decade, and the New York Times wrote that its $8 million opening was 60 percent above industry predictions. By Sunday, however, the latter number had been revised drastically downward, from $8 million to barely over $7 million.

It's not because "Melania" is an exquisitely made, informative documentary. It's not even a documentary. Instead, it falls in the category of glossy advertisement or unconvincing propaganda film with a multimillion-dollar music licensing budget. Amazon MGM Studios paid $40 million for the rights to film. That offer came with a jaw-dropping $35 million marketing budget, which Amazon spent while also cutting 16,000 corporate jobs.