DRAGON BALL SUPER: SUPER HERO opening | BEAST opening | Awards season movies | August 19 to 21, 2022 weekend
Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary
The current weekend: August 19 to 21, 2022
1) Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero opening
- This is another outstanding Crunchyroll anime opening. Crunchyroll dominates the genre now (they were previously called FUNimation) — this is their sixth action anime. Sony Pictures owns 95% of the company. Their Jujutsu Kaisen: 0 opened to $17.7m in March 2022, and their Demon Slayer: Mugen Train opened to $21.1m in April 2021. This has become an impressive niche theatrical business.
- Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero has earned $18m after nine weeks in Japan, which is low for Crunchyroll, and it's going to impact the foreign total. Reviews are sensational for this and for all of their movies. Note in the chart, this screen count is big for their releases; it’s a step up for Crunchyroll. On the other hand, Crunchyroll movies play fast in the U.S. — their domestic multiples are low:
2) Beast opening
- This is a fair opening for an action adventure film featuring a beast. The weekend figure is roughly average. Reviews are good-not-great. These movies play well overseas, but we do not expect that kind of business for a realistic beast movie like this:
- August slows down at the box office every year, but with no big releases during the last two weeks, business has dropped more than normal, to roughly -40% below August 2019, and that’s how it will continue until October (Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile 10/7, Halloween Ends 10/14, Black Adam 10/21, Ticket to Paradise 10/21). We’ll have complete August BO totals in a couple of weeks.
3) Awards season movies
- As noted last week, the year-end release schedule is filling in with the awards season films. It's still early and there are going to be surprises and late-comers — CODA was a late-comer last year. But at this point, there are a good number of wide-release, commercial movies that will compete in the major awards categories, including:
Avatar 2 (Avatar 1 received 9 Acad nominations, including best pic and director)
Black Panther 2 (Black Panther 1 received 7 Acad nominations, including best pic)
Elvis
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Fabelmans
Top Gun 2
- And as always, there will be accomplished movies from talented writer/directors:
Babylon (Damien Chazelle, Paramount)
The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, Searchlight)
Bardo (Alejandro González Iñárritu, Netflix)
The Son (Florian Zeller, Sony Classics)
TÁR (Todd Field, Focus Features)
Till (Chinonye Chukwu, UA)
Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund, Neon)
White Noise (Noah Baumbach, Netflix)
Women Talking (Sarah Polley, UA)
and many others
- Two of the titles above are from Netflix (Bardo and White Noise), which means that at this point, the awards movies are predominantly theatrical releases. And the top list of commercial movies is strong, which is different from recent years. All of this is potentially very good for moviegoing, but again, it's early and the lists will change.