In holdover news for Friday, Bad Boys 3 has passed $400 million worldwide. The Will Smith/Martin Lawrence action sequel has vastly overperformed about releasing in mid-July. It is going to become the first”new” January release (not counting Oscar platformer American Sniper from 2014/2015) to pass $200 million domestic. The $90 million flicks are among the greatest R-rated action movies in raw unadjusted grosses, even counting superhero movies (Logan, Deadpool, and Deadpool 2) and war movies (American Sniper and Saving Private Ryan). It’s near the top at the global rankings, even counting those films and sword-and-sandal epics like Troy and The Last Samurai.
Of note, it is… intriguing that the two biggest movies of the year thus far have come not from Disney or even from Universal and Warner Bros., but out of Sony and Paramount. Disney has not entered the ring, and both Universal’s Dolittle and 20th Century’s Call of the Wild will be doing fine if not for their exorbitant budgets. In case Onward plays more like a pre-summer DreamWorks Animation launch, and Mulan performs nearer to Dumbo than Cinderella. We may go into the summertime with Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog, Paramount’s A Silent Place two, Sony’s Bad Boys For Life, and United Artists’ No Time to Die (dispersed overseas by Universal) since the season’s biggest domestic earners.
As Spectre was just the second 007 movie to pass $200 million nationally (and it had to be dragged kicking and screaming over the end line), Bad Boys For Life ($197 million by tomorrow) could begin summer as the 2020s most significant national grosser. This is somewhat speculative, as both No Time To Die and Onward could crack $225 million. But it matters just a little that the initial two breakout national biggies of this year were not out of Disney, Universal or even Warner Bros. We may be approaching a stage where Netflix and Amazon try to supplant Sony and Paramount as two of the five studios around. Still, they are not going down without a fight.
James Marsden and Jim Carrey’s Sonic the Hedgehog earned $3.45 million (-46percent ) on Friday to get a probably $15.18 million (-42percent ) weekend and $127.474 million 17-day cume. It is still playing nearly identically to Deadpool, so we are still probably looking at a $162 million domestic finish for Paramount’s $85 million video game version. That will put it just beyond the unadjusted gross profit of Detective Pikachu ($144 million) and the adjusted grosses of Pokémon: The First Movie ($85 million in 1999) and Mortal Kombat ($70 million in 1995) to become the biggest unadjusted and second-biggest adjusted-for-inflation video game movie ever, behind just Tomb Raider ($131 million in 2001/$211 million adjusted). It ought to be at approximately $265 million.