After a quiet start last week, December’s big movies kicked off this weekend with Sony’s Kraven the Hunter and WB’s anime film Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim. Despite being fresh new features, neither movie were able to stand against the might of Disney and the Wizard of Oz.
Per the Hollywood Reporter, Kraven came in third behind both Moana 2 and Wicked: Part One, which have been out since late November. At time of writing, the R-rated antihero flick has made $26 million globally, $11 million of which came from domestic audiences. Sony’s gamble of making movies about Spider-Man baddies without the webhead himself has had diminishing returns this year, and not even Aaron Taylor-Johnson brutally killing people could change that, it seems. Reviews have been mainly negative, so Sony’s probably going to be more selective about who gets a movie going forward, assuming Sony’s Spider-Man Universe still has a future.
Meanwhile, Rohirrim made $5 million domestic, and $10.3 million globally. Set about 200 years before the Peter Jackson movies, it boasts some creative talent from those earlier films—namely co-writer Philippa Boyens, and Jackson and Fran Walsh as EPs—and garnered a mixed reception thus far. It’s a weird time for Lord of the Rings right now: along with the ongoing Prime Video show, WB’s trying to kick off at least one new movie centered on Gollum, who also headlined last year’s pretty disastrous video game. Add on the Jackson films getting re-released into theaters over the summer, and people may have been Rings’d out, assuming they had any interest or knew of Rohirrim in the first place.
As for Moana and Wicked? They kept on making money; the former swam to $717 million globally and maintained a first-place lead at $26.6 million domestic as it heads for $1 billion. Wicked’s now made $500 million, but it’s got an ace up its sleeve with the sing-along version hitting theaters on Christmas Day. Speaking of, next week sees the release of Sonic 3 and Mufasa on December 20, then Nosferatu on Christmas Day—meaning Kraven and Rohirrim may end up get pushed out of theaters soon.
If you saw either of this weekend’s new movies, let us know what you thought about them in the comments below.
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