Refresh for updates The top grossing titles at the weekend domestic box office, were straight from Canada with Paramount’s SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run landing the No. 1 spot with $900K from 300 locations per the Melrose Ave studio with $345K on Friday, and $300K on Saturday, -13%.
SpongeBob Movie, along with Trolls: World Tour, have been the only new major studio mainstream movies (not counting specialty label titles) to be released during the pandemic.
Solstice Studios’ Russell Crowe road rage movie Unhinged, distributed in Canada by VVS, but it made $230K on Friday for a $582K 3-day.
This past weekend, the country’s hard-top theaters were largely reopened, led by Canada’s biggest chain, Cineplex Entertainment, which had 137 of its 164 locations reopened. Their entire circuit from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Victoria, British Columbia will be open next weekend. Landmark, Canada’s other notable chain, has been open for weeks. I hear business for both movies was more prominent in the suburbs than the city; the notoin that people are largely avoiding public transportation during the pandemic.
School doesn’t start in Canada until Sept. 8, so Paramount is looking forward to a good runway with Sponge on the Run. Why is the movie getting a threatrical release in Canada and not the U.S. (even though it’s headed to PVOD early next year with Netflix having foreign rights)? Because there’s no CBS All Access in Canada.
“I’m excited with the marketplace open and that people are going to the movies,” Paramount’s domestic distribution boss Chris Aronson told Deadline this morning.
Here in the U.S., the second weekend of RLJE Films’ Shia LaBeouf movie The Tax Collector took in $203,7K at 138 locations for a 10-day of $634K. The pic was No. 1 last weekend. The action movie from David Ayer has clocked over $5M on digital and VOD platforms in its first eight days, remains No. 1 on the iTunes charts.
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