One of these days, Hollywood might again remember that there’s gold in them Super Bowl weekend hills. I’m old enough to remember that 2006-2013 run when Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds and Taken could open on this weekend with over/under $30 million domestic debuts, while the likes of Chronicle, When a Stranger Calls, The Woman in Black and Warm Bodies could post $20 million-plus openings. I’m old enough to remember when She’s All That became a definitive example of the late 1990s/early 2000s YA boom with a $16 million opening weekend. I’m not quite old enough to remember when Vice Squad and The Seduction each nabbed $2.1 million openings in 1982. However, both films are (obviously) now available on Tubi, and their inflation-adjusted $8 million debuts would be almost enough to top the box office on Super Bowl weekend 2026.
I am sympathetic. We haven’t had a true-blue breakout on this, uh, “holiday weekend” since Warm Bodies ($20 million) in 2013. And some of that can be attributed to studios slating biggies just before (Kung Fu Panda 3 in 2016, The Maze Runner: The Death Cure in 2018) or just after (Fifty Shades Freed in 2018, The LEGO Movie Part 2 in 2019) the game day weekend. And that’s not even counting the years (including 2026) for which Super Bowl weekend arrived just before Presidents’ Day weekend. Nonetheless, beyond just the above-noted examples of concurrent game day glory and box office fortune, every “bad weekend” is only such until one studio bucks the odds and launches a champion. Money is made by the films that show up. And with the bigger studios mostly taking the weekend off, the little(r) engines showed that they (relatively) could.
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