Lionsgate is on a quest to right the ship after a horrible 2024 at the box office, and it’s off to a strong start with “Den of Thieves: Pantera,” which grossed $15 million in its opening weekend in 3,008 locations.
Not only is it the first number one for the studio since “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” in November 2023, but it is also its highest opening weekend since that film. It also matches the unadjusted opening of the first “Den of Thieves” in 2018 and surpasses the $10.2 million opening of “Airplane,” the latest Lionsgate film with “Den of Thieves” star Gerard Butler.
Reception for the film has been mixed to positive with a B+ CinemaScore, the same as the first film, along with Rotten Tomatoes scores of 58% from critics and 79% from audiences. Produced by Tucker Tooley in association with eOne, G-Base and Diamond Movie Productions, the film has a budget of $40 million with the breakeven point reduced by Lionsgate’s traditional use of overseas pre-sales to recover costs.
In second place is Disney’s “Mufasa” with $13.2 million in its fourth weekend, pushing the “Lion King” prequel to surpass $500 million worldwide with $188 million. nationally and 539.7 million dollars worldwide. Next week, it will surpass the global circulations of “Kung Fu Panda 4” and “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” to become the seventh highest-grossing release of 2024.
Paramount’s “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” is in third place with $11 million, enough to make it the first film in the Sega series to surpass $200 million in domestic grosses. The film’s cumulative total now stands at $204.5 million domestically and $384.8 million worldwide.
It’s a mixed weekend for Paramount, as the continued success of “Sonic” adds to the extremely poor performance of “Higher Man,” which grossed just over $1 million in 1,291 theaters. That’s less than the $1.38 million A24’s acclaimed “The Brutalist” earned this weekend on just 68 screens.
The film was produced independently with a budget of $110 million, and Paramount acquired the film for $25 million.
“Higher Man,” a musical biopic about British pop star Robbie Williams in which he is portrayed as a CGI ape, earned strong reviews with an 87% from critics and a 94% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. But Williams’ popularity has never spread beyond Britain, and his lack of notoriety is causing the film to be largely ignored. Even in the United Kingdom, “Higher Man” is not doing well, having already dropped out of the prime 5 in that country with only $4.8 million grossed as of last weekend.
Back in the prime 5, Focus Options’ “Nosferatu” takes fourth place with $6.8 million, bringing its domestic cume to $81.8 million. Disney’s “Moana 2” occupies fifth place with $6.3 million, giving it a cumulative total of $434.6 million and $989 million worldwide, placing it on the threshold of becoming the third Disney release in 2024 to cross the billion dollar mark.
More to come…
