WORLDWIDE BOX OFFICE FOR WEEK ENDING JANUARY 26, 2025
A film's gross for the last seven days, followed by its total worldwide gross. I begin with data from
Comscore and then pull from every other source available.
1. Mufasa: The Lion King–$39m / $627m worldwide
2. Sonic The Hedgehog 3–$27m /$447m ww
3. Moana 2–$16m / $1,026b ww
4. Flight Risk–$16m worldwide debut
5. Octopus With Broken Arms aka Wu Sha 3 (Manslaughter 3)–$15m / $130m ww
6. A Complete Unknown–$13m / $74m ww
7. Paddington in Peru–$13m / $73m ww
8. Wolf Man–$13m / $28m ww
9. One of Them Days–$11m / $25m ww
10. Nosferatu–$10m / $166m ww
11. Honey Money Phony–$10m / $62m ww
12. Wicked–$8m / $717m ww
13. Big World–$6m / $109m ww
14. Conclave–$6m / $82m ww
15. Babygirl–$6m / $37m ww
16. The Brutalist–$6m / $12m ww
17. Den of Thieves 2: Pantera–$4m / $40m ww
18. Better Man–$4m / $17m ww
19. Dark Nuns–$4m ww debut
20. Hitman2–$4m ww debut
21. Detective Conan: Crossroad in the Ancient Capitol (2003)–$3m / $53m ww
22. Presence–$3m ww debut
23. Brave The Dark–$3m ww debut
24. The Prosecutor–$2m / $38m ww
25. Finist. The First Warrior–$2m / $24m ww
26. Hot Pot Artist aka Huo Guo Yi Shu Jia –$2m / $8m ww
27. Gladiator II–$1m / $460m ww
28. Harbin–$1m / $31m ww
29. Homestead–$1m / $21m ww
30. Fake Dad–$1m / $6m ww
31. The Last Showgirl–$1m / $4m ww
32. September 5–$1m / $2m ww
33. Operation Hadal–$1m ww debut (preview?)
Bold: movies that have or likely will triple their reported budgets. That's my standard for a movie being a box office hit from theatrical alone. Many films will be profitable for a studio even if they don't triple their reported budget, but it's a good marker to indicate a big hit.
ANALYSIS
More madness with movies being rushed to PVOD. Nosferatu grossed $20m last week, was poised to earn four Oscar nominations (albeit in technical categories) and yet they still rushed it into homes. This week it made $10m. Do they really think demand to watch it at home would collapse if they waited another few weeks? When a movie only costs $50mb to make, a $20m week is a lot of money. It's also manna from heaven for movie theaters, which can really make good money off a popcorn film with legs like this one.
Speaking of Oscar nominations, A Complete Unknown and Conclave are the two films benefitting the most. Mind you, Conclave is also in homes already, whereas the Bob Dylan bio-pic is a pure theatrical play, with Timotheé Chalamet hosting SNL and singing (as himself) three deep cut Dylan songs. But mid-sized movies that appeal to adults are precisely the sort of movies that can do well off Oscar attention and they're doing just that. Of course it's a complete unknown how Conclave might have done if it weren't also available in homes. (Or a known unknown, as Donald Rumsfeld would have said.) Yet it's already a hit, thanks to a $20mb, whereas A Complete Unknown cost $60mb and needs another $100m to be a hit from theatrical alone. That's doubtful but if it can get to $140m or so, it will be a solid success.
This week I saw Wicked and I'm Still Here. Wicked is a lot of movie and boy, at least the money is onscreen. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande enliven things a lot but with weak songs and a very padded storyline, I was exhausted. At the two hour and twenty minute, Jeff Goldblum is doing a soft shoe number and Elphaba and G(a)linda are debating whether a major infrastructure project in Oz should use red, blue, purple or perhaps yellow bricks for the road and I in disbelief wondered what the hell was going on.
In contrast, I'm Still Here is a solid drama with a terrific Fernanda Torres as the wife of a man kidnapped by government forces in Brazil. It's based on a true story and while I might still root for Mikey Madison from Anora, I certainly won't be upset if Torres wins the Oscar. (Still haven't seen Demi Moore's body horror film The Substance.)
NOTE: One movie fell off my box office radar. The Indian action-drama Game Changer opened to $31m last week. This week? I can't get any update. By all accounts it collapsed at the Indian box office. But even a 90% drop worldwide would mean it still made $3m. I'll update when numbers appear.
NOTES
mb = a film's budget in millions of US dollars; ww = worldwide
1. Mufasa: The Lion King–$200mb
2. Sonic The Hedgehog 3–$120mb
3. Moana 2–Is the budget lower since it was intended for tv, at first? Or higher because they had to rethink everything? Disney says it cost $150mb, just like the original. You can bet Dwayne Johnson gets more than his share of coconuts, but that won't matter with a hit like this.
4. Flight Risk–$25mb for director Mel Gibson action film starring Mark Walhberg.
5. Octopus With Broken Arms aka Wu Sha 3 (Manslaughter 3)–Chinese drama about businessman's daughter kidnapped from his home.
6. A Complete Unknown–$60mb+ for this Bob Dylan biopic? That's a lot of money for a film about Dylan going electric at Newport. I mean, I want to see it but then I'm a Dylan fanatic. Off to a very good start and star Timotheé Chalamet is sure to get an Oscar nomination, so it should keep going. But $180m worldwide seems highly unlikely to me, if not impossible. (Do other countries give a toss about this? Is Chalamet a big enough draw for this story? I doubt it.) I'm glad it was made, but it was made for too much. Like Gladiator II, this will be seen as a commercial success, but it's not.
7. Paddington in Peru–$50mb? I'm just guessing. (That's sort of midpoint between the original and Paddington 2.) Sadly, three times is not the charm artistically for this once-perfect franchise. This week the film had conflicting info. Comscore says the film grossed $6m this weekend...but the movie's overall take jumped by $23m from $60m to $83m? Wikipedia and Box Office Mojo claim its total jumped $13m to $73m. That extra $7m from Monday to Thursday is more believable so I'll go with that for now.
8. Wolf Man–$25mb
9. One of Them Days–$14mb. It's always good to gross your budget during a film's opening week. So yea for producer Issa Rae and this comedy starring Keke Palmer and SZA. (What a week for SZA! Her movie opens well and she makes my list of The 250 Best Albums of the 21st Century...So Far.
10. Nosferatu–$50mb for Robert Eggers, acclaimed director of The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman. That had his biggest budget and was not a commercial success. I saw him as more of an arthouse guy. But backers stuck with him, gave him a big budget and a starry cast for a remake of Nosferatu, which I guess is classier than remaking Dracula but still a hard sell I thought. And on Christmas Day? That's counter-programming I was not behind. Happily, I was wrong and Eggers looks more like the next Peter Jackson/Guillermo Del Toro than a guy given big budgets too fast or for the wrong projects. Good for him!
11. Honey Money Phony–Chinese rom-com about young woman suddenly burdened with debt who falls for a (very handsome) young con man. Will he go straight for her or teach her his wicked ways so she can get out from under this financial disaster?
12. Wicked–$150mb for each part, so $300mb total plus beaucoup marketing. It's a big movie!
14. Conclave–a reported $20mb for this Vatican thriller means this is a hit. It's at $60m and still going strong, with a boost from potential Oscar noms. I do not see the point in putting it on PVOD and flooding the market with bootlegs while potentially harming box office. This is exactly the sort of film that can play and play in theaters.
15. Babygirl–$20mb for this Nicole Kidman sexy drama about a powerful businesswoman finding her kink with a younger, dominating man..her intern, no less! No milk was harmed in the making of this movie.
16. The Brutalist–$10mb; Adrien Brody in this architect-as-hero period drama.
17. Den of Thieves 2: Pantera–$40mb for Gerard Butler action flick.
18. Better Man–$110mb!!! I just gasped when I saw the budget. Oh dear. I love the craziness of this movie. But that's a LOT of money for such a nutty idea. And forget the nutty idea. It's a musical biopic about an artist whose music I really like but has virtually no profile outside the UK. For heaven's sake, Queen is one of the biggest acts in the world and their biopic cost literally half of this one. Better Man would have been a big gamble at $30mb.
19. Dark Nuns–Korean supernatural thriller w two nuns working together to save a boy seemingly possessed by a demon while protecting the sanctity of their order. It's a spin-off of The Priests aka Black Priests, which came out in 2015 and grossed $36m. Why it took a decade to capitalize on the first film is a mystery itself.
20. Hitman2–Korean action comedy. The creator of a webtoon series is derided for the quality of his latest season...until real-life terrorists seem to mirror his storyline and he's suddenly under suspicion by the government. The original film grossed $18m.
21. Detective Conan: Crossroad in the Ancient Capitol (2003)–China reissue of Japanese animated franchise entry. Film had $32m before reissue in China. I mean, they keep making them so I assume they're profitable.
22. Presence–$2mb for retired director Steven Soderbergh's first of two movies out in 2025.
23. Brave The Dark–no budget for presumably very low cost faith-based indie film about the importance of performing arts programs?
28. Harbin–A South Korean historical drama set in the early 1900s about rebels fighting against the Japanese occupation of Korea. When one rebel leader shows mercy to Japanese prisoners and his men pay the price, he vows to redeem himself by assassinating the first Prime Minister of Japan. So this one will probably not have a good run in Japan.
29. Homestead–faith-based post-apocalyptic drama from Angel Studios. A survivalist fantasy. Based on a series of ten, poorly reviewed novels.
30. Fake Dad–Chinese comedy.
31. The Last Showgirl–$2mb for Pamela Anderson's performance as Vegas showgirl whose revue suddenly closes after 30 years. Not so fast, Demi, says Anderson.
32. September 5–no budget listed for this period drama about the attack on Israeli Olympians at the 1972 Munich Olympics, all told from the perspective of the ABC sports team that suddenly found itself covering the biggest news story in the world.
33. Operation Hadal–In director Dante Lam's Chinese action film, mercenaries have taken over a deep sea platform in Chinese waters and well, the Chinese Navy is not about to take that lying down.
THE CHART AND HOW IT IS COMPILED
This column is a week by week tracking of box office around the world. It is compiled by pulling from every possible source: ComScore, Box Office Mojo, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, charts for countries like China and India and South Korea, individual stories in trade or general interest newspapers, Wikipedia and anyone else discussing box office.
ComScore Weekly Global Box Office Chart
The weekly charts contain the total gross for every movie in theaters around the world during the last seven days. If a movie opens on a Thursday, we include all the box office from Thursday through Sunday. If it opens on a Tuesday night, we cover all six days. If it opens on a Sunday (as some movies do in India or wherever, depending on holidays), then we include the box office for that one day. If a movie was released before the current week, we include the box office for all seven days. Why ignore the box office from Monday through Thursday, as most charts do when tallying the latest weekend and focusing on new releases?
How do we arrive at this number? We take the total worldwide box office we have for a movie, subtract from it the previous week's total worldwide box office...and that's how much it made during the past seven days. Naturally, territories and movies sometimes fall through the cracks but we are as up to date as we can be, given our dependence on other outlets for the basic info.
First, I list box office on every film we can from around the world. Any movie grossing at least US $1 million will be on here if we get info on it. Then I give some thoughts on the box office overall and individual films. That's followed by notes where I give info on each movie, with a focus on films not from Hollywood. So Despicable Me 4 you know. But a small Korean comedy or French drama? That I'll identify for you as best I can.
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