Box Office: ‘Doctor Strange 2’ Rules Again as ‘Firestarter’ Flames Out

J. Kim Murphy Tom Cruise is king at the domestic box office once again.Paramount’s “Top Gun: Maverick” is soaring to the top of the charts for its second weekend of release, drawing in a commanding $25 million on Friday from 4,751 locations.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterTom Cruise’s star-spangled blockbuster “Top Gun: Maverick” capped off Memorial Day weekend with a box office debut for record books. The sequel, which sees Cruise return to the cockpit after 36 years, collected $156 million in its first four days of release.Those ticket sales were enough to overtake Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” which launched with $153 million over the long weekend in 2007, as the biggest Memorial Day debut in history.Paramount and Skydance had originally expected “Top Gun: Maverick” to finish the long weekend with $151 million, but the film had a better-than-expected turnout on Sunday, pushing the three-day haul to $126 million.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterTom Cruise may have pulled off one of the most daring stunts of his career — getting audiences to go to the movies for something that doesn’t involve superheroes.“Top Gun: Maverick” pulled in blockbuster ticket sales in its opening weekend, collecting $134 million from a record 4,732 North American cinemas. Paramount and Skydance’s all-American action adventure is expected to collect $151 million through Monday, defying expectations while also setting a new high-water mark for Memorial Day opening weekends.

Jordan Moreau Tom Cruise’s all-American blockbuster “Top Gun: Maverick” has begun its box office flight, taking in $19.3 million on Thursday.The large Thursday haul marks the biggest preview for Paramount Pictures and the highest preview for the Memorial Day holiday.The long-delayed sequel to 1986’s “Top Gun” could become the first movie of Cruise’s career to open to $100 million. Thanks to positive reviews, high anticipation and heaps of nostalgia, “Top Gun: Maverick” is projected to rake in $85 million to $100 million over the long Memorial Day weekend.Paramount was originally supposed to open “Top Gun: Maverick” in the summer of 2020, but the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic had other plans and scrambled its takeoff. Two years later, the tentpole finally premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where crowds of movie-lovers lined up to see the star in action.

Everything Everywhere All At Once has broken a US box office record for indie studio A24.The ambitious, multi-dimensional martial arts film, direct by The Daniels (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), overtook Uncut Gems as the studio’s highest-grossing movie ever, making $52,263,484 (£41,829,079) at the US domestic box office after the weekend.The Michelle Yeoh-starring film could be on course to overtake Ari Aster’s horror movie Hereditary as A24’s highest-grossing movie worldwide ($80million) – especially as it still hasn’t opened in all international markets yet, even after its delayed release in UK and Ireland cinemas on May 13.Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang in the film, a mother thrown into a sci-fi action-adventure – alongside Jamie Lee Curtis, Stephanie Hsu and Ke Huy Quan – after she learns she’s able to access the memory and skills of alternate versions of herself throughout the multiverse.Watch the trailer for Everything Everywhere All At Once below.Earlier this month (May 13), Yeoh said she texted Jackie Chan teasing him about turning down the lead role.The martial arts legend was originally envisioned by Scheinert and Kwan as playing Everything Everywhere All At Once‘s main character. However, when he said he was unavailable, they rewrote the part for Yeoh.“Jackie actually texted me,” she told the Guardian about his response to the film.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau ChiefCinema box office this year in North America is poised to overtake theatrical revenues in China, the country that has been the world’s largest movie market for the past two years.Before the latest weekend, gross revenues in the year to date stood at $2.38 billion for the North American compared with $2.43 billion for China, according to data from ComScore.U.K.-based research firm Gower Street Analytics forecast that the North American figure would overtake China’s revenues over the weekend or early this week. That reflects business growth in North America and the current reversal in China, where anti-COVID measures are causing renewed cinema closures.Gower Street says that some 85% of global cinemas are now open for business, compared with pre-pandemic levels.

LOS ANGELES -- Doctor Strange and his multiverse got to linger a little longer atop the weekend box office as Tom Cruise and “Top Gun” wait in the wings.Marvel's “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” was the top-earning film of the weekend for the third straight week, bringing in $31.6 million in 4,534 North American theaters, according to studio estimates released Sunday.“Downtown Abbey: A New Era” made a strong opening showing for Focus Features with $16 million from 3,820 theaters, but there was no real blockbuster competition for “Doctor Strange."That will change with the long awaited, and long delayed, release of “Top Gun: Maverick,” the sequel that arrives next week on Memorial Day weekend, 36 years after the original smash hit and cultural landmark.It flies in amid sky-high hype.Cruise had the film festival in Cannes, France, abuzz on Wednesday with a whirlwind appearance for the film's European premiere that included a fly over of French fighter jets and an honorary Palme d’Or award.But while the world waits, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” crossed the $800 million mark in global grosses, surpassing “The Batman” to become the top-grossing film of the year.Released by the Walt Disney Co. and directed by Sam Raimi, “ Doctor Strange 2 ” benefitted from being the first Marvel movie to follow “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” in which Benedict Cumberbatch’s sorcerer played a pivotal role.It also builds upon the popular Disney+ series “Wandavision” and contains a number of cameos that fans didn’t want to be spoiled.Holdover family films “The Bad Guys” and “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” took the third and fourth spots.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterThe Crawley family still has the royal touch at the box office. “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” a sequel to the big-screen continuation of the beloved British television show, captured $16 million from 3,815 North American theaters in its domestic debut.

Last week’s Tony Award nominations translated into box office sales for at least some of the contenders, with A Strange Loop seeing the biggest boost: The musical, which topped the Tony list with 11 nominations, saw a $213,871 increase in its weekly grosses, taking in $690,668 for the week ending May 15.

“Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” stayed on top of the box office charts during its second weekend in theaters, earning an additional $61 million from North American theaters, according to studio estimates on Sunday.With $688 million in global grosses, it’s already one of the highest grossing films of the pandemic and the second biggest of 2022. But a 67% fall is also a steep drop — even for reliably frontloaded superhero films.

“Doctor Strange 2” screenwriter Michael Waldron knows a thing or two about the multiverse. He first burst onto the scene as a writer on the beloved animated series “Rick and Morty” and was in line to become the show’s new showrunner, that is until Marvel Studios came calling asking if he wanted to head up a live-action TV show about Tom Hiddleston’s trickster villain Loki.It was while working on the Disney+ series “Loki” that Waldron was offered the opportunity to take a crack at a few different things all in one project: Marvel’s first horror movie, a Sam Raimi movie and a “Doctor Strange” sequel.

Kendrick Lamar just dropped his new album and he has more great news for fans – he’s going on tour!

Bartees Strange has returned with another preview of his forthcoming second album, ‘Farm To Table’, sharing the poignant and powerful new single ‘Hold The Line’.A notedly emotive cut from the Washington, DC indie-rocker, Strange explained in a press release that ‘Hold The Line’ is one of the most thematically raw tracks on ‘Farm To Table’. It was inspired by George Floyd’s seven-year-old daughter Gianna, who was thrust into the public eye when her father was murdered by former police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020.Strange expounded: “I remember watching George Floyd’s daughter talk about the death of her father and thinking wow – what a sad introduction to Black American life for this young person.

Bartees Strange has shared new song "Hold The Line." The track was written in May 2020 following the death of George Floyd and concerns his young daughter, Gianna. In a statement, Bartees Strange says: “I remember watching George Floyd’s daughter talk about the death of her father and thinking wow - what a sad introduction to Black American life for this young person.

Fun in the sun! The weather is heating up, and summer is right around the corner. Bring on beach days, barbecues and barefoot bashes! In order to properly prep for the upcoming season, we need to restock on beauty essentials and step up our storage game (can you tell we’ve been binging The Home Edit on Netflix lately?).

With nearly all 36 productions settling into full schedules last week, the Broadway box office tally climbed a modest 7% from the previous week, totaling $31,199,660, with attendance of 249,219 showing a 3% bump.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media ReporterFor the past two years, box office reports have been accompanied by a COVID-shaped asterisk: Ticket sales were [insert adjective of choice] for a pandemic.After all, “Wonder Woman 1984,” “F9: The Fast Saga” and every would-be blockbuster in between could have generated more in ticket sales without a devastating global health crisis upending the movie theater landscape.But as “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” debuted to $90 million last October ($10 million more than its predecessor) and “Spider-Man: No Way Home” landed the second-highest domestic debut in history with $260 million, the caveats began to fade. Add in “The Batman” ($134 million debut in March) and “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” ($71 million start in April, $13 million more than its predecessor), and those numbers weren’t just notable for a pandemic, they were plain notable.