'Bullet Train' Wraps Up the Summer Movie Season

It's almost time for school to start, and that means Hollywood is winding down its summer blockbuster movie season. This week's big new release, the comedy thriller Bullet Train starring Brad Pitt, will be the last big movie to be released before studios start to focus on their fall releases. Read on for details.

Via Box Office Mojo.

The summer is having its last stand for big studio movies this weekend with Sony’s Bullet Train, the comic action-thriller starring Brad Pitt. Based on the bestselling Japanese novel by Kōtarō Isaka, the film is set on the world’s fastest train between Tokyo and Kyoto. Pitt plays an assassin who wants to retire but is roped in to get his hands on a briefcase on the train only to discover that various world class assassins are on the same train with interconnected missions. David Leitch (former stuntman for Pitt as well as director of Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, Nobody, and uncredited co-director on the first John Wick) directs, and the large cast also includes Joey King, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Brian Tyree Henry.

Bullet Train is Pitt’s first starring role since 2019, which saw Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood (also from Sony) became the rare adult drama blockbuster, with $143 domestic and $375 worldwide (Pitt wasn’t alone in drawing the audience, of course, with co-star Leonardo DiCaprio and writer/director Quentin Tarantino sharing the credit). Pitt didn’t have the same luck with Ad Astra, which released just a few months later and grossed $50.2 million domestic and $127 million worldwide off a $90 million budget, but Pitt remains one of the few names name keeping star-driven, high-budget, original movies alive.

It’s hard to say where Bullet Train will end up in the long run and if it has the horsepower to recoup its $90 million budget. A good comp for the weekend is the Sandra Bullock/Channing Tatum starrer The Lost City, another star-driven original film combining comedy and genre fun, albeit with a different flavor (incidentally, it also featured Pitt in a cameo, and Bullock returns the favor in Bullet Train). That late March release opened to $30.5 million and grossed $105 million domestically, and such a finish wouldn’t be bad for Bullet Train considering the typically strong international skew on Pitt’s films (nearly all of them from the past decade have seen at least 60% of their box office abroad).

If the film opens well, it may be enough to push the overall weekend box office above $100 million after falling under by just $2.3 million last weekend, and this will likely be the last weekend for the next two months that even has the potential to cross that benchmark. The light schedule over the next few months is an unfortunate sign for the box office as a whole, but Bullet Train may benefit by being the only game in town when it comes to big-budget, star-driven Hollywood spectacle. The critical response is just okay at 56% on Rotten Tomatoes, but how audiences react is another story. Most of the world gets the film this week, though it will come later in Japan, South Korea, and Italy, and there is no release date for China.

The other studio release going wide is the comedy Easter Sunday from Universal. In the Jay Chandrasekhar directed film, comedian Jo Koy gets his first starring role as an actor and comic who spends the Easter holiday with his dysfunctional Filipino-American family. Co-stars include Jimmy O. Yang, Tia Carrere, and Tiffany Haddish. We’ve seen few live action comedies break out (or even get released at all) in the pandemic era, and it’s not clear if Jo Koy’s audience and America’s large Filipino community are enough for Easter Sunday to recoup its $17 million budget. No reviews are in yet.

Get the rest of the story at Box Office Mojo.