The August 28-30 weekend saw the biggest box office results of any weekend since the COVID-19 pandemic closed cinemas back in March, with The New Mutants leading a weekend that, while extremely quiet by pre-COVID standards, was big for 2020.
Variety is reporting that The New Mutants earned around $7 million for the weekend, following a $750,000 take from Thursday previews. This is well above the $4 million Unhinged earned the previous weekend. According to Box Office Mojo, cinemas around the US earned around $11 million over the weekend.
This is a funny ending to The New Mutants’ long, strange road to a cinema release–the film wrapped in 2017, and was initially planned for a 2018 release. It finally settled into an April 2020 release date after numerous delays–but then had to be pushed back.
Variety has a quote from Cathleen Taff, the president of global distribution at Disney, about the movie’s opening weekend. “We’re encouraged by the results,” she says, noting that there’s “clearly an appetite” for going to the cinema. “We have to stay fluid and work with the framework of this new reality,” she notes.
Here’s the full top 5 for the weekend.
August 28-30 US Box Office Top 5
- The New Mutants: $7 million
- Unhinged: $2.6 million
- The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run: $604k
- The Personal History of David Copperfield: $520k
- Words on Bathroom Walls: $453k
The New Mutants received a 6/10 in GameSpot’s review, and essentially concludes the long-running X-Men film franchise following Disney’s purchase of Fox–the X-Men will likely be folded into the Marvel Cinematic Universe going forward.
Next weekend will see the limited release of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which has already earned $53 million in international markets. That makes it the ninth highest grossing film of 2020 before its US release; it’ll be interesting to see how far it goes.
In much of the world, of course, it’s still extremely unsafe to travel to a cinema–if you’re planning a trip, be careful, and avoid cinemas entirely if there’s a chance of infection via community transmission.
