USA box office on the second weekend of January 2023 was up 44% compared to last year when "Scream" was the top-grossing movie. And it was down 34% compared to the 2020 peak when "1917" was the top-grossing movie.
Movie theater operators owe a debt of gratitude to the Na’vi and the new queen of artificial intelligence.
January tends to be a slow time of year at the box office. Yet James Cameron’s blockbuster sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water” and Universal’s viral horror movie “M3GAN” continue to slay in North America, prevailing over three new nationwide releases during the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend.
1/15/2023 update starts here
USA box office on the second weekend of January 2023 was up 45%
compared to last year when "Scream" was the top-grossing movie. And it was down 42% compared to the 2018 peak when "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" was the top-grossing movie.
Watching Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon,” in all its superficially titillating, occasionally exciting and mostly exhausting wretched excess (the orgies, the elephant poop, the contempo actors overdoing it as dawn-of-cinema stars, the general air of cynical performative effrontery), I thought to myself: We’ve been here before, so many times.
You sit down to watch a movie by a director whose work you love. He’s swinging for the fences. His ambition is on full display and so, in fits and spurts, is his talent. Yet something else is on display too: a lack of judgment that starts out like a worm, wriggling through the proceedings, before growing and metastasizing until it’s eating everything in its path.
Original 1/14/2023 post starts here
USA box office on the second weekend of January 2023 was down 7.5% compared to last year when "Scream" was the top-grossing movie. And it was down 42% compared to the 2020 peak when "1917" was the top-grossing movie.
While still not at pre-pandemic levels, the box office is performing stronger than it did last year on this Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, led of course by Disney/20th Century’s “Avatar: The Way of Water” as it passes $550 million domestic.
