THE LOST CITY opening | Romantic comedies | RRR opening | INFINITE STORM opening | March moviegoing | March 25 to 27, 2022 weekend
Opening weekend box office figures, charts and commentary
The Current Weekend: March 25 to 27, 2022
1) The Lost City opening
- This is an excellent opening. Romantic comedies have been in decline for a dozen years, well before the pandemic, but this is among the top-15 openings for the genre, all-time. The combination of big cast + crowd-pleasing romance + comedy + adventure has worked before, and it's working again. Critics scores and audience ratings are very good. When these movies connect, they have legs.
- Only one romantic comedy has spawned a sequel in the last 10 years — Crazy Rich Asians (that follow-up is in the works). Before that, there were a dozen series, although they rarely lasted more than two episodes (only American Pie and Bridget Jones had more than two). It's not easy to continue a romantic comedy story in a sequel, but The Lost City is performing at that level:
2) Romantic comedies
- Through the early 2000s, there was at least one romantic comedy per month, sometimes two, with lots of big films: Mamma Mia! ($620m worldwide, 2008), Sex and the City ($419m, 2008), My Big Fat Greek Wedding ($369m, 2002), Bridget Jones ($282m, 2001), American Pie ($236m, 1999), and Knocked Up ($220m, 2007), et al. But during the last eight years, we’ve had three or four romantic comedies per year. (Jennifer Lopez returns this summer in Shotgun Wedding.) Here are the numbers:
* During the last four years, there have been a third fewer releases due to the pandemic. If there had been no pandemic and we had a full count of movies, we would have around 13 romantic comedies between 2019 and 2022, same as in the previous period.
3) RRR (Roudram Ranam Roudhiram) opening
- RRR is opening to an unprecedented est. $12 million at 1,200 theaters. There’s an established North American footprint for Indian movies, but until now, nothing has opened on more than 425 screens. The film is an Indian epic war drama in the Telugu language about two fictional revolutionaries in the 1920s — a $73m production, 3 hours 7 minutes. The writer/director, S. S. Rajamouli, made Baahubali 2: The Conclusion, which opened to $10.4m in April 2017 on 425 screens. No chart for this movie, it’s a total outlier.
4) Infinite Storm opening
- This is a weak opening. Action adventures are some of the biggest movies made, often mixing science fiction and fantasy. In this case, Infinite Storm is a realistic true story, not to be confused with sci-fi or fantasy action adventure, and it's from an indie distributor:
5) Where we are now
- Next weekend we'll have complete March numbers. Right now, we like what we're seeing at the box office. On top of Batman, we've had a string of strong, original releases in a variety genres. Reviews and audience scores have been excellent. Holdover business has been very good. We've had no dead weekends. Comedies are resonating. There remain serious challenges ahead, but moviegoing is showing enormous improvement, and the release schedule is about to get busier.