Box Office: ‘Death on the Nile’ Besting ‘Marry Me’ in Quiet Super Bowl Weekend Showdown

variety.com:

J. Kim Murphy There’s a battle between love and “Death” at this weekend’s domestic box office, as the Jennifer Lopez rom-com “Marry Me” and Kenneth Branagh’s follow-up to his 2017 whodunnit “Murder on the Orient Express” both attempt to lure older audiences back to movie theaters in their openings. “Death on the Nile” looks to bow at No.

1 with a muted $12.8 million from 3,912 locations, while “Marry Me” will follow with an expected $8 million intake.Disney and 20th Century Studios’ “Death on the Nile,” based on the famous Agatha Christie novel, took in $5.1 million on Friday, an underwhelming though not exactly disastrous tally.

That’s only half as much as the opening day gross of its predecessor “Murder on the Orient Express” ($10.7 million), which eventually legged it out to a $102 million domestic gross.

While Gal Gadot’s Linnet Ridgeway-Doyle may have enough champagne to fill the Nile in the film, it seems dubious that the whodunnit could sell enough tickets to fill the $90 million hole left by its production budget.