SUNDAY AM: Nothing seismic going on in a traditional weak Labor Day weekend in regards to box office fluctuations, but we’ll leave you with this: Disney, together with its 20th Century Studios label, led summer 2024 (May 3-Labor Day) with $1.53 billion thanks to a comeback in brands Pixar with Inside Out 2 and MCU with Deadpool & Wolverine as well as its Fox brands of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and Alien: Romulus.
Disney is up +121% over last summer’s $692M misfires of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Haunted Mansion and the foreign fallout of Little Mermaid. Universal was second, including Focus Features, with $754.6M (+23% from the summer of Oppenheimer, the studio grossing $616M) built chiefly on the backs of Twisters and Despicable Me 4.
True, Fall Guy didn’t fire off summer, and it was always meant to be off-season programming, but talk about getting blood from rock with $92.9M for that feathered fish off a $27.7M opening, a 3.3x multiple.
That’s close to the same multiple of David Leitch’s last directed summer movie, Bullet Train. Not putting lipstick on a pig, but noteworthy. Sony was third after firing off the summer streak back in early June with Bad Boys: Ride or Die, followed by its female romance renaissance, It Ends With Us. The Culver City lot collected $520.4M including Sony Classics and Crunchyroll labels.
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