Weekend Box Office: Minecraft has the biggest video game movie opening weekend ever!

There’s going to be a lot of celebrating tomorrow morning at Warner Bros’s Burbank lot. For the first time since Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice in the fall, the studio has a legitimate box office smash, with A Minecraft Movie blowing past industry expectations to make a whopping $157 million this weekend. That’s more than twice what we predicted earlier this week, but even the most optimistic industry forecasts didn’t expect this to make more than $100 million. It’s now the highest opening for a video game movie ever, beating the $146 million The Super Mario Bros Movie earned in 2023.

This comes along at just the right moment for WB, who have suffered from a huge slate of pricey box office bombs, including Furiosa, Joker: Folie a Deux, Alto Knights, and the recent Mickey 17. Will this be enough to turn around the company’s fortunes? It’s hard to say, but one thing is for sure: expect A Minecraft Movie 2 in theaters before long. Notably, the film is also a huge hit for Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess, re-teaming him with his Nacho Libre star Jack Black. 

Otherwise, the Jason Statham action flick, A Working Man, had a decent hold this weekend, only falling 53% to $7.276 million, with a $27 million domestic total. That’s not too far off from what The Beekeeper made in its second weekend, with that one legging out to a terrific $66 million domestically. While A Working Man likely won’t have those kinds of legs, it will no doubt turn a solid profit for Amazon/MGM and will be a considerable streaming success once it moves to Prime Video in a few months.

One noteworthy thing about the top 10 is that it features not one but two collections of episodes from the hit Christian series The Chosen. The Last Supper Part 2 opened slightly below expectations with $7 million, while Part 1 was further down the charts at 7, with $1.8 million and a $18 million total. For episodes you can stream, those are mighty respectable numbers. 

Disney’s Snow White proved to be just as much of a disaster as everyone anticipated, with its free fall at the domestic box office continuing this weekend. It fell another 58% to just over $6 million and a $77 million domestic total. There’s little else for Disney to do now but cut their losses and throw the movie on Disney Plus. It’s proven to be one of the biggest bombs of the year – that’s for sure. Blumhouse’s The Woman in the Yard is also proving to be one of its more obscure offerings, grossing $4.5 million for a $16 million plus domestic total. That said, given how low they keep their budgets, that’s not an awful result. A24’s Death of a Unicorn, despite its high-profile stars (Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega), continued to die at the box office, making $2.6 million for a $10.7 million domestic total. Between this and Opus, A24’s off to a rough start at the box office this year – although next weekend’s Alex Garland flick, Warfare, might turn things around. 

Next up on the chart were two Indies that didn’t make much of an impression this weekend. Finn Wolfhard’s Hell of a Summer, from Neon, had a modest $1.75 million opening, while The Friend, starring Bill Murray and Naomi Watts, made $1.6 million, despite rave reviews (including one from us). Finally, the top 10 was rounded out by Captain America: Brave New World, with $1.3 million and a total that’s only a hair away from crossing the $200 million mark.

Next weekend, we see the release of two lower-profile action flicks, Warfare and The Amateur, neither of which is likely to pose much of a threat to A Minecraft Movie’s domination. Will you go see either? Let us know in the comments!

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