Weekend Box Office Update: Mufasa reclaims the top spot for the holiday weekend

UPDATE: The 4-day-holiday estimates have come in from Comscore, and it looks like Mufasa: The Lion King was able to edge out One of Them Days to take the top spot. Propelled by holiday matinees, Mufasa made $15.5 million compared to One of Them Days‘s $14.225 million. The weekend’s big flop, Wolf Man, clawed its way to a third-place finish with $12.5 million. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 wasn’t far behind with $11 million, while Moana 2 was able to pull ahead of Den of Thieves 2: Pantera with an $8.1 million gross. That was all expected, given that school is out for Martin Luther King Day, so a lot of folks are taking their kids to see movies. Even still, this was one of the lowest-grossing MLK weekends on record, as last year Mean Girls and The Beekeeper proved to be breakout hits. Nothing this weekend even came close to the $33 million the Mean Girls musical made or even the $18.7 million The Beekeeper made in second place.

ORIGINAL POST: It looks like we have the first flop of 2025, with Universal and Blumhouse’s Wolf Man badly underperforming at the box office this MLK weekend. Industry insiders thought the movie would gross at least $20 million (we predicted $17 million). Still, toxic word-of-mouth (the C-minus CinemaScore rating is telling) has torpedoed the first major horror release of the year. It made only $10.5 million this weekend, which is good enough for a third-place finish. How bad did it do? It made less this weekend than the horribly reviewed Night Swim did a year ago, and only made less than a million more than Blumhouse’s poorly received Imaginary. Given that director Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man made $28 million on its first weekend back in 2020, the hope was that this would be a similar-sized hit. However, audiences do not seem to be responding to this grounded take, which eschews everything audiences love about the werewolf genre (silver bullets, full moons, etc.) in favour of a body horror vibe that’s derivative of The Fly and emphasizes family drama over scares.

Instead, the low-budget One of Them Days (which our critic loved), starring Keke Palmer and SZA, was a surprise word-of-mouth hit, grossing $11.6 million, which is good enough for a first-place finish. Mufasa: The Lion King was just behind it with only a $70k difference (according to ComScore), and it will likely finish ahead of the pack when the four-day-MLK holiday grosses are tallied up. So far, Mufasa has made over $200 million domestically after a slow start at the box office. While it will end its run with only a fraction of what the 2019 Lion King made, it’s had decent legs (or paws) at the box office. Its Christmas rival, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, fell to fourth place with $8.6 million, while last week’s champ, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, fell 56% to $6.6 million. It will likely end its run just under the $44 million made by its predecessor. 

Disney’s Moana 2 made another $6 million-plus this weekend, for a total gross of $442.8 million. Nosferatu is closing in on the century mark, with the $4.3 million total putting it close to a $90 million domestic gross. A Complete Unknown has also held up well, making $3.79 million this weekend for a $57 million domestic total. If it winds up getting a lot of Oscar nods, it has a good chance of hitting $70 million domestically. Meanwhile, Wicked made another $3.55 million for an outstanding $464 million domestic haul (it will likely end its run just shy of $500 million), while A24’s Babygirl rounded out the top 10 with $2.02 million for a $25.3 million domestic gross.

We’ll be back tomorrow with a full wrap-up of the MLK weekend grosses and an update on how awards contenders like The Brutalist and September 5 are performing. 

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