Spider-Man eyes a fifth straight box office win this weekend, but after everything Coyote vs. Acme went through just to reach movie theaters, simply getting a theatrical release probably would have felt like a victory.
Turns out Wile E. Coyote wasn’t ready to settle for that.
The long-delayed Looney Tunes movie is having a pretty good opening weekend, coming in as the strongest of this week’s major newcomers. No, it isn’t enough to chase Spider-Man: Brand New Day out of first place. But after years of wondering whether anybody would ever get the chance to buy a ticket to Coyote vs. Acme, becoming the weekend’s biggest new release sounds pretty good.
According to Variety, the Coyote vs. Acme box office got started with an estimated $5.2 million domestically on Friday, with the movie heading toward approximately $13.5 million for the weekend.
Not bad for a movie that once looked like it might never see the inside of a theater.
Coyote vs. Acme box office finally gets its weekend
There aren’t many movies that have taken a road to theaters quite like this one.
Warner Bros. originally decided not to release the completed Coyote vs. Acme, setting off a backlash among filmmakers and movie fans who couldn’t understand how a finished movie could simply disappear. For a while, that looked like it might actually be the end of the story.
It wasn’t.
Ketchup Entertainment eventually acquired the movie, and now Wile E. Coyote is exactly where plenty of people wanted him to be all along: on the big screen.
Director Dave Green takes one of the longest-running jokes in animation and asks a pretty reasonable question. After all those defective ACME products have exploded, collapsed and generally made Wile E. Coyote’s life miserable, shouldn’t somebody be held responsible?
So he gets a lawyer.
Will Forte, Lana Condor and John Cena lead the live-action cast, sharing the movie with Wile E. Coyote and other familiar Looney Tunes characters.
A $13.5 million Coyote vs. Acme opening weekend isn’t going to rewrite the box office record books. That’s not really what makes this weekend interesting, though. Coyote vs. Acme was nearly denied an opening weekend altogether.
Now it has one, and people showed up.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day — Spider-Man eyes another box office win
Unfortunately for Wile E. Coyote, catching Spider-Man is a little harder.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is on its way to a fifth straight weekend at No. 1 in North America, with the Sony and Marvel blockbuster expected to bring in around $22 million.
Five weekends is a long time to own the top of the weekend box office, especially during the summer.
The latest Spider-Man: Brand New Day box office estimates have the Tom Holland superhero movie sitting at approximately $891 million domestically. At this point, another No. 1 finish almost feels like the smaller part of the story. The bigger question is just how high that domestic total can climb before Spider-Man: Brand New Day finally runs out of steam.
So far, that hasn’t happened.
The Odyssey refuses to leave the weekend box office
Then there’s The Odyssey.
Christopher Nolan‘s epic is now in its seventh weekend, which usually isn’t when you’re talking about a movie fighting for one of the top spots on the chart. Yet here it is, battling Coyote vs. Acme in what could turn into a close race for second place.
Seven weeks into a theatrical run, that’s quite a trick.
The Odyssey has already become the biggest box office success of Christopher Nolan‘s career, and audiences clearly aren’t finished with it. New movies have arrived, opened and started moving down the chart while Nolan’s film keeps finding people willing to head to a theater to see it.
At this rate, Odysseus may have an easier time staying at the box office than he did getting home.
As Spider-Man eyes No. 1, The Dog Stars box office gets off to a rougher start
The news isn’t nearly as good for Ridley Scott.
The Dog Stars earned roughly $3 million on Friday and is currently looking at an opening weekend of around $7 million.
For a movie playing in more than 3,000 North American theaters, that’s a tough start for The Dog Stars at the box office.
Jacob Elordi stars as a survivor trying to make a life in a devastated world with his dog until a mysterious radio transmission suggests there may be something waiting beyond the isolated existence he’s built.
And there’s plenty of recognizable talent around him. Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, Allison Janney and Benedict Wong are all part of the cast.
The question now is whether audiences who do see The Dog Stars can help it stick around over the next few weeks. For opening weekend, though, the numbers aren’t where anyone involved would have wanted them.
Insidious: Out of the Further is still scaring up some business
Horror hasn’t disappeared from the weekend box office either.
Insidious: Out of the Further, which opened in second place last weekend, is expected to add roughly $9 million in its second weekend. That would put its domestic total somewhere around $43 million.
It’s a fairly steep drop from opening weekend, but that’s hardly unusual for horror.
So Spider-Man: Brand New Day is still No. 1, and Spider-Man eyes another weekend box office victory. Christopher Nolan is somehow hanging around near the top seven weekends later. Ridley Scott is having a rougher weekend. Insidious: Out of the Further is still finding horror fans.
And Wile E. Coyote finally got his movie into theaters.
He didn’t catch Spider-Man.
Considering how close Coyote vs. Acme came to never being released at all, though, becoming the weekend’s biggest new movie isn’t a bad catch.
You May Also Like:
