One Love feels the love with $51M opening, Madame Web withers

One new entry this weekend made sweet music hitting a higher note than box office experts predicted. The other basically arrived DOA and did little to change expectations with a weak opening. With a random, arbitrary “weekend” kicking off with Wednesday’s Valentine’s Day, the Bob Marley biopic, Bob Marley: One Love, opened to $51 million. For the normal weekend, it earned a solid $27.7 million.

Madame Web, the latest ill-advised Sony superhero film based on a title character with minimal connection to Spider-Man, opened to $25.8 million. Over the weekend, it brought in $17.6 million. That’s not a shocking number considering there was very little buzz or excitement when Madame Web was announced.

Neither newcomers fared well with critics. One Love currently has a 43% score on Rotten Tomatoes while Madame Web fared far worse with 13%. If that holds, Madame Web will manage the seemingly impossible – topping Jared Leto’s Morbius, which has a 15% Rotten Tomatoes score. In a not so encouraging sign, Morbius (now on Amazon) managed $39.1 million for its weekend opening.

Thanks largely to its reasonable $70 million budget and a very strong A CinemaScore, the Kingsley Ben-Adir-fronted One Love shouldn’t have too much trouble turning a profit.

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Madame Web wasn’t the most expensive superhero film in the last few years. It had a sensible $80 million budget, but its C+ CinemaScore suggests it’s going to have a harder time finding positive word of mouth.

Rounding out the Top 5 were Argylle, the Matthew Vaughn spy-thriller he’s stated he envisioned as a trilogy. Those hopes are pretty much Madame Web dead as this weekend’s $4.72 million took the box office total for three weeks to $37.2 million domestically and $76 million worldwide. Again, for context, the heavily derided Morbius made more than Argylle’s entire domestic run on its opening weekend. And it’s getting nowhere close to earning back its $200 million budget.

Migration keeps flying along with $3.76 million to take its total to $116 million domestically and an overall global haul of $254 million.

Wonka wraps up the Top 5 with $3.49 million for the weekend taking its totals to $210 million domestically and $600 million worldwide. Star Timothee Chalamet is about to compete with himself at the box office with Dune: Part 2 poised to devour some sand worms and a majority of the box office when it debuts on March 1.

Photo Credit: Sony Pictures/Paramount Pictures

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