Universal/DreamWorks/Jellyfish Pictures’ “Dog Man” has given a bit of a boost to a sagging box office, earning a $36 million opening weekend from 3,885 theaters.
It’s a substantial jump from DreamWorks’ last adaptation of a Dav Pikey graphic novel, “Captain Underpants,” which opened to $23.8 million in 2017. In fact, it is second only to the $41 million opening of “Kung Fu Panda 3” in 2016 among animated releases in January.
Largely animated by the U.K.-based Jellyfish Pictures on a $40 million budget, “Dog Man” will be a mid-budget success for Universal as it quickly rebounds from the misfire of Blumhouse’s “Wolf Man,” which is already out of the top 10 in its third weekend and has made just $19.9 million domestically against a $25 million budget. As “Dog Man” makes a play for a $100 million-plus domestic run, Universal will keep plugging movies into theaters with 87North’s “Love Hurts” starring Ke Huy Quan next weekend.
Also opening this weekend is Warner Bros.’/New Line’s “Companion,” a darkly satirical horror film starring Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid that has opened to $9.5 million from 3,285 theaters.
It’s a good start for a film with a reported $10 million budget before marketing costs, and now it will try to leg out with its strong word-of-mouth, boasting a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score and a B+ on CinemaScore. By comparison, last month’s breakout horror hit, “Nosferatu,” got a B-.
Disney’s “Mufasa” is in third on the charts, showing legs that are getting more and more impressive with each passing weekend. In its seventh frame, the Barry Jenkins “Lion King” prequel added $6.6 million to bring its total to $230 million domestic and $653 million worldwide.
It’s a pretty dramatic comeback from the anemic $35 million domestic opening it earned the weekend before Christmas. But as TheWrap noted back then, it was still a very possible scenario that family audiences simply hadn’t had the time yet to see “Mufasa” and that the film could build up the momentum it needed over the holidays.
That scenario has come to pass as “Mufasa” will pass Paramount’s “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” this week to become the highest domestic grosser among this past December’s releases.
Sony/TriStar’s “One of Them Days” is in fourth with $6 million in its third weekend, giving the $14 million comedy a $34.5 million domestic total. Lionsgate’s “Flight Risk” completes the top 5, sliding 53% from its opening weekend to $5.6 million for a $20.9 million 10-day total.
Like so much of the post-COVID shutdown box office, the numbers for 2025 after one month can be viewed either positively or negatively. According to Comscore, ticket sales are up 3.5% from January 2023, a month that got support from films like “M3GAN” and “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Grosses for the month of January came in at $543 million, up 8.3% from last year.
The negative interpretation is that the January box office remains more than 40% down from pre-pandemic levels. Totals for the first month of the year exceeded $800 million every year from 2012 to 2020, peaking at $1.03 billion in January 2016.
While theaters expect studios to commit more films to their screens in 2025 and beyond, the huge drop shows how much the early-year box office has been diminished by the decrease in release quality and the near-total loss of revenue support from Oscar-nominated films, which used to be a major pillar of the winter marketplace.
Searchlight’s “A Complete Unknown” and A24’s “The Brutalist” are the only two Best Picture nominees still with a significant presence in theaters, with “Unknown” grossing $2.2 million this weekend for a $66.7 million total while “The Brutalist” continues to leg out as a specialty title with $1.6 million from 1,612 theaters
