#box-office

#box-office

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.

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.

One Piece's Monkey D. Luffy joined the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade floats, the latest Demon Slayer film earned $780 million at the worldwide box office in 2025, and the animated musical KPop Demon Hunters (though not technically anime) became the most-watched original Netflix movie of all time. As someone who had no one to talk to growing up during the days of Naruto and Dragon Ball Z, it's tough to even process that the genre has reached mainstream status around the globe.

Is " Gas-Leak Cinema" dead? Ella McCay debuted at number six at the domestic box office, with $2.1 million in ticket sales. That's across 2500 screens, putting James L. Brooks's latest flick in the Christy zone. Not even Lisa Simpson doing the #EllaMcCayChallenge could save the film at the box office. The film also has a 22% on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics calling it

The runaway box-office success of movies like Demon Slayer and Chainsaw Man may have been the splashiest anime story of 2025, but arguably, those films owe their returns entirely to the hype behind anime television. Both films dragged a rabid fandom to the cinema to catch the next "canonical" installments of their respective franchises. Though demon-killing shonen action ruled the silver screen (not to exclude films like 100 Meters and The Last Blossom), the smaller screen proved an embarrassment of riches across genres and tones

After breaking box-office records with a string of $40 million openings, the studio released Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, which just bolstered its status as the season's most formidable Oscar contender by sweeping the first week of precursor awards. And if, for some reason, One Battle stumbles before the finish line, the title that's best positioned to likely win in its stead is another Warner Bros. movie: Ryan Coogler's Sinners, which, like OBAA, has shown up everywhere it's needed to this season.

The reviews rolling out for Five Nights at Freddy's 2 are brutal, featuring F grades and one critic saying that "there's simply nothing of value here." The sequel premieres in theaters today, December 5, and stars Josh Hutcherson, Piper Rubio, Matthew Lillard, Elizabeth Lail, Mckenna Grace, and Megan Fox. On Metacritic (a GameSpot sister site), Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is currently sitting at a 32 metascore. That means "generally unfavorable," and of the 15 reviews so far, only one is positive.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.