'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3' Wins Another Weekend
by EG
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 retained a solid percentage of its audience in its second weekend of release, leading it to a second trip to the top of the box-office charts. The Marvel movie faced virtually no competition for the teen and young adult audiences, though, making it difficult to say for sure whether the film's decent performance marks a turnaround from the recent superhero slump. We'll have a better idea next week, when Guardians will face major competition from action franchise installment Fast X. Read on for details.
Via Variety.
Disney’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3″ was victorious again at the domestic box office, adding $60.5 million in its second weekend of release.
Ticket sales dropped by 49% from its debut, marking an impressive hold… at least for a superhero movie. Across more than 30 Marvel entries, only 2018’s “Black Panther” (down 45%) and 2011’s “Thor” (down 47%) have enjoyed stronger second weekend holds. By comparison, recent MCU movies such as “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and “Thor: Love and Thunder” declined by nearly 70% in their sophomore outings. Those were brutal falls, even for movies that debuted to more than $100 million. They also served as reminders that Disney’s premier franchise may remain critic-proof in terms of opening weekends, but they’re no longer immune to quickly falling back down to Earth.
That’s at least partially the reason that Disney needs the $250 million-budgeted “Guardians 3” to remain steady, especially as summer blockbuster season revs into high gear with “Fast X” on May 19 and “The Little Mermaid” on May 26. So far, the third and final installment in the James Gunn-directed Marvel trilogy has generated $213 million in North America and $528 million globally.
Elsewhere at the domestic box office, moviegoers didn’t ventured far beyond the mammoth headquarters of Knowhere. Rome, Venice, Tuscany and the other lush Italian locations in “Book Club: The Next Chapter” fielded less foot traffic than expected. The sequel to 2018’s hit septuagenarian comedy opened to $6.5 million from 3,507 North American theaters, arriving on the lower end of projections.
Critics weren’t totally charmed by the second “Book Club,” which reunites the core group of readers in Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen. Neither were audiences, who saddled the film with a “B” CinemaScore.
Get the rest of the story at Variety.