Before we get to the putrid taste left in this writer’s mouth regarding the loose remake of The Crow and its disastrous debut, let’s skedaddle our way through the other positives of the weekend.
Deadpool & Wolverine returned to first place in its fifth weekend with $18.3M and earned $577.2M domestically in thirty-one days. With legs like this, it’s sure to reach the $625 million domestic space inhabited by The Last Jedi and The Avengers and looks to get slightly below $1.3 billion as it wraps up its run. So, yes, it’ll become the third-biggest non-Avengers superhero motion picture under the MCU canon behind Black Panther and Spider-Man: No Way Home by tomorrow. Once again, Disney reaped its rewards by A) giving audiences a spectacle they wanted and B) returning to the nostalgic form, though overused, for another high-ride of momentum for the following slate of whatever Marvel plans next. Hugh Jackman might need to keep blowing his muscles out, as they may have him play the one and only Wolverine for other infinite years. To Secret Wars and beyond, yo.
Alien: Romulus took in $16.2 million in its second weekend; it’ll pass Covenant domestically by the end of this sentence. With a nice-charged overseas performance, it has passed $225 million globally. Once it passes $237 million, it’ll be the second-highest Alien feature behind Prometheus. It should have enough juice to reach $300 million worldwide and $120 million domestically. It Ends With Us earned $11.65 million in the U.S. in its third weekend. The Blake Lively vehicle is nearing $250 million worldwide and pulling serious weight as a romantic melodrama that can easily top $300 million.
Blink Twice nabbed fourth place with $7.3 million for Zoe Kravitz’s directorial debut. The situation awareness for Amazon may carry those flowers over for another high-budgeted debut to cross their honors someday, but this is not the case with Fly Me to the Moon. The “trigger warning” is a more maligned case of MPA ratings than suppressing the feature’s potential, but a warning is sufficient. The Forge rounded out the top five with $6.64 million with an A+ from CinemaScore, a good start for a faith-based drama.
Twisters will pass $350 million sometime later today, Despicable Me 4 has passed $885 million worldwide, and Trap is finagling its way to $75 million (another excellent cornerstone for Mr. Shyamalan to attest to his drawing power, even if folks clamor for a more intriguing development that was once his calling twenty years ago). Oh, and Inside Out 2 will pass The Lion King (2019) to become the undisputed highest-grossing animated film in a week or so.
All right, now we have to twist our heads to The Crow. So, what the hell happened? The best answer is that an IP revival stuck in purgatory will forever remain in purgatory when it is time to unveil it. After many years of starts and stops, the remake dropped to poor reviews and a $4.6 million debut. So many gestating IP-focused remakes don’t amount to much of anything, let alone some success in the theater. You can easily ask Robocop, Total Recall, Point Break, and even The Amazing Spider-Man that did not live up to the bar. The exposition and inferior elements compared to its 1994 predecessor make it a hard pill to swallow, and thus, another case is that you can’t remake every property because someone “might” be interested. Much like Disney has learned with its live-action remakes: for every Lion King and Aladdin, there is a Dumbo and a Mulan (even if COVID got in the way).
Next weekend, we see the release of Afraid, 1992, Slingshot, Reagan, and First Shift.
