
“Better to be king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime,” Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) infamously said in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, though comedy has been anything but king at the box office for the past several years. Apart from name recognition titles like Barbie, Beetlejuice, and Ghostbusters, the struggle is real out there. It did not get much better this weekend when the genre delivered one of those very recognizable titles and it failed to live up to expectations and its critical lauding. But could an animated title with some name recognition of its own break a longstanding late summer curse against the genre?
King of the Crop: The Fantastic Four: First Steps Holds on but Suffers a Big Drop
The Fantastic Four: First Steps once again led the way with no problem this weekend. After last weekend’s frontloaded start there was some concern just how big the drop would be, and that concern may have been warranted after a 66% drop down in week two to $40 million, bringing its 10-day total to $198.4 million. Last week we looked at that loaded front and showed how Thor: Love and Thunder was similarly frontloaded, fell 67.7% in its second weekend, and still grossed over $343 million. Thunder had a larger start than First Steps, so now it is a concern that the latter may struggle to reach $300 million domestic. The truth is that it’s right in the middle of the great divide between grosses in the MCU.
The top 21 films in the current Marvel brand all grossed over $300 million and had grossed at least $176 million in their first 10 days. The first Guardians of the Galaxy is No. 21 on that list. No. 22 is Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which is part of the lower half of this Cinematic Universe, where only one film grossed higher than $250 million and only three more than $220 million. First Steps’ $40 million second weekend is lower than any of the films in that top 21, with Guardians of the Galaxy ranking as the lowest with $42.1 million. First Steps is still $22 million ahead of that film’s pace and $35 million behind Love & Thunder. Those films respectively grossed $25.1 million & $22.5 million in weekend three. If First Steps can level off to begin matching the last Thor film, it should still be on pace to get itself just over $300 million. If it falls below $20 million next week, that could doom that milestone. Globally the film is over $368 million and should still have no issues reaching at least half a billion. A final tally of $600 million may be a little out of reach, but these numbers still look good enough, and a win is a win for Marvel right now.
Tales of the top 10: The Bad Guys 2 outshines The Naked Gun, Jurassic World REbirth crosses $750 million worldwide
Universal had a nice little hit back in 2022 with the animated The Bad Guys. Opening in late April to $23.9 million, it ended up grossing more than four times that with $97.2 million and another $149 million internationally. A sequel was inevitable, and here we are with The Bad Guys 2, hoping to break the August curse associated with animated films. (It’s more of a kids-going-back-to-school thing than a curse, but studios never seem to get the memo.) And it is off to a decent start, if less than the original. Its $22.2 million debut is the fourth-best opening for an animated film during this month behind the R-rated Sausage Party ($34.2 million), 2023’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem ($28 million and still the only animated film this month to gross over $100 million), and Planes ($22.23 million). Only five have ever grossed more than $50 million. The Bad Guys 2 will certainly get there, and parents should know that this is the only (new and wide) animated release anywhere until Zootopia 2 opens at Thanksgiving. Globally the $80 million-budgeted film is over $44 million.
Those hoping Liam Neeson would bring balance to the force that is big screen comedy may have been shooting their own blanks and dooming the genre further, because the legacy reboot of The Naked Gun made just $17 million this weekend, less than The Naked Gun 2 ½ opened to ($20.4 million) back in 1991. This is down from projections of potentially $30 million just a few weeks back, which is not exactly great with a $42 million budget. Another $11.5 million was made internationally. Despite that, the “new version” still had a higher opening than most pure spoofs over the years, as evidenced by the list below of such films since 1980:
Austin Powers in Goldmember ($73.0 million), Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me ($54.9 million), Scary Movie 3 ($48.1 million), Scary Movie ($42.3 million), Scary Movie 4 ($40.2 million), The Naked Gun 2 ½ ($20.8 million), Scary Movie 2 ($20.5 million), Date Movie ($19.0 million), Epic Movie ($18.6 million), Meet the Spartans ($18.5 million), A Haunted House ($18.1 million), The Naked Gun (2025) ($17.0 million), Last Action Hero ($15.3 million), Scary Movie V ($14.2 million), ( Not Another Teen Movie ($12.6 million), Vampires Suck ($12.2 million), Team America: World Police ($12.1 million), Undercover Brother ($12.0 million), Hot Shots! ($10.8 million), Dance Flick ($10.6 million), Spy Hard ($10.4 million), Hot Shots! Part Deux ($10.2 million), Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery ($9.54 million), Superhero Movie ($9.51 million), The Naked Gun (1988) ($9.3 million), Loaded Weapon 1 ($9.2 million), A Haunted House 2 ($8.8 million), Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood ($8.1 million), Robin Hood: Men In Tights ($6.8 million), Spaceballs ($6.6 million), Mafia! ($6.5 million), High School High ($6.3 million), Disaster Movie ($5.8 million), The Comebacks ($5.5 million), Airplane II: The Sequel ($5.3 million), History of the World Part I ($4.7 million), Airplane! ($4.5 million – first week of wide release), Top Secret! ($4.4 million), Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid ($4.2 million), Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story ($4.1 million), MacGruber ($4.0 million), Wrongfully Accused ($3.504 million), Fatal Instinct ($3.502 million), BASEketball ($3.08 million), Club Dread ($3.05 million), Rustler’s Rhapsody ($2.3 million), Student Bodies ($597,400 in 628 theaters), I’m Gonna Git You Sucka ($543,588 in 135 theaters), Black Dynamite ($131,862 in 70 theaters), This is Spinal Tap ($30,835 in 3 theaters)
Feel free to debate if Edgar Wright’s brilliant Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are pure parodies (I’d argue otherwise). Akiva Schaffer’s Certified Fresh The Naked Gun not even opening better than most of the works of Friedberg & Seltzer (i.e. Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, Vampires Suck), a collective work that adds up to a TOTAL of 16% on the Tomatometer (you could throw in their direct-to-video The Starving Games, but it literally won’t add anything to it with a 0%), is maybe the saddest fact of them all.
Even Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, and David Wain couldn’t make that list with their rom-com spoof, They Came Together, as it was barely released in 2014 and I can personally attest to a packed house at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago rolling in laughter during it. The point is that great comedies still exist (one of them won Best Picture last year) but some of them need not just discovery but better releases from their studios. If you don’t think Happy Gilmore 2 would be pulling in $100 million-plus in theaters instead of on Netflix, you might work for Netflix. It seems as if the savior of big-screen comedy has not arrived yet. Let’s just hope that branding one with name recognition does not scare off studios further from bringing laughter back to theaters. We’ll see how Bleecker Street pulls off Spinal Tap II in September.
James Gunn’s Superman in its fourth weekend made $13.8 million. It will leapfrog Jurassic World: Rebirth on the charts this week, as it stands just a million behind with $316.2 million. Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice was at $311.4 million after 24 days with just a $9 million fourth. Spider-Man 3 had $303.9 million with a $14.3 million fourth. If Superman continues dropping off in the 50%+ region week-to-week, it could end up around one of our early estimates in the $350 million realm. The Gunn numbers, however, are also in the Spider-Man 2 region ($15 million fourth weekend, $317.9 million in 24 days). To get into the $360-370 million region, Superman would need drops of around 35-45% going forward. Globally the film is over $551 million and should turn a decent if unspectacular profit to kick off the new DC plan.
Weekend five for Jurassic World: Rebirth finds the film in fifth with $8.8 million. That amounts to a 33-day total of $317.6 million. That is $35 million less than Dominion’s total at this point, but just a million or two behind both Spider-Man 3 and Thor: Love and Thunder. If Jurassic continues on the Thor path (which included a $7.7 million fifth weekend), it will finish around the $340 million mark. If it regresses to Spidey 3 (a $7.5 million fifth), it will be closer to $330 million. Rebirth is at $766 million worldwide, making it just the third American film to do so this year and the 25th film to achieve that since the pandemic began.
Neon opened Michael Shanks’ Together on Wednesday and the acclaimed Sundance horror film starring real-life married cuple Dave Franco and Alison Brie has made $10.8 million since then, $6.8 million over the weekend. That is the third-best five-day total for the studio, which has only had two handfuls of releases opening wide in their first weekend. Osgood Perkins is still their champion with Longlegs ($28.2 million) and The Monkey ($16.4 million) in their first five. But horror is apparently Neon’s secret weapon, because ranking fourth and fifth are Immaculate ($6.6 million) and Steven Soderbergh’s Presence ($4.02 million). Cuckoo, It Lives Inside, and Infinity Pool are the next three on that list. Together is poised to become just their fifth release to gross over $20 million.
Warner Bros. and Apple’s F1: The Movie continues to add to its total. $4.1 million brings its domestic total up to $173.2 million. Worldwide the film has cleared $545 million, and with a tally that high, people would rarely question its profitability, especially considering it’s the highest-grossing film of star Brad Pitt’s career. Exceptions of late would include gigantic budgets attached to Fast X, Justice League, and the pandemic costs saddled to the recent Mission: Impossible films. Apple insists the budget is a nice round $200 million despite multiple reports and sources that it was higher predating the film’s release. If that number is accurate, then Joseph Kosinski’s film would seem to have crossed the finish line into profitability. If not, then it is much like watching Pitt’s Sonny Hayes substitute loopholes to gain an advantage on the track.
Sony, who released the last three Smurfs movies, may be disappointed that their reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer did not rise to the heights of Final Destination: Bloodlines or even 28 Years Later. But that doesn’t mean it’s a complete failure. $29.4 million domestic after a $2.7 million third weekend does mean that it will be the lowest-grossing domestic release of the franchise. However, when you add in another $29 million on the international side for a total over $58 million, the green light with an $18 million budget looks pretty solid in a year for the studio made up of minor profits and minor losses.
Despite the big merger, Paramount is definitely not having a great few weeks on the theatrical side of things. Someone missed the declining grosses on the Smurfs movies and figured maybe there was still enough juice on the international side. That is certainly true enough compared to the domestic grosses on the latest, which sit at a paltry $28.5 million after making just $1.7 million in its third weekend. Even with its international figures, the math is still way off where it needs to be for profit.
How to Train Your Dragon reached $260 million this weekend with $1.3 million. Until either Superman or First Steps surpasses it, the live-action remake can say it is the fourth-highest grossing North American release of the year. (It is over $618 million worldwide.) That domestic total may be just good enough to stay in the top 10 of domestic releases by the end of 2025 with Avatar: Fire and Ash, Wicked For Good, and Zootopia 2 looming, unless a certain sequel to a remake next week really explodes with its audience.
Just outside of the top 10, Ari Aster’s Eddington lost 1,500 theaters in its third week and dropped to just $496,000, bringing its total to $9.5 million. A24 also released the documentary Architecton this weekend; it made $58,000 in 107 theaters. Meanwhile, Oscilloscope’s CatVideoFest 2025 was in 199 theaters and grossed $460,000.
On the Vine: Will Freakier Friday Be an August Success Story?
Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan return as mother and daughter and vice versa in the sequel to their 2003 hit remake. Freakier Friday is hoping to be this summer’s big August success story. There are also high hopes for Weapons. Could Zach Cregger’s follow-up to his modest hit Barbarian be the original horror breakout the genre has been looking for? Family audiences will also have the incredibly fun and charming Sketch, starring Tony Hale, whose character’s daughter’s drawings come to life.
Full List of Box Office Results: August 1-3, 2025
- The Fantastic Four: First Steps – $40.0 million ($198.4 million total)
- The Bad Guys 2 – $22.2 million ($22.2 million total)
- The Naked Gun – $17.0 million ($17.0 million total)
- Superman – $13.8 million ($316.2 million total)
- Jurassic World: Rebirth – $8.7 million ($317.6 million total)
- Together – $6.8 million ($10.8 million total)
- F1: The Movie – $4.1 million ($173.2 million total)
- I Know What You Did Last Summer – $2.6 million ($29.3 million total)
- Smurfs – $1.7 million ($28.5 million total)
- How To Train Your Dragon – $1.3 million ($260.4 million total)
Erik Childress can be heard each week evaluating box office on Business First AM with Angela Miles and his Movie Madness Podcast.
Thumbnail image by ©Marvel Studios