The first box office weekend of 2019 largely belongs to holiday holdovers, as studios typically withhold their major releases until Martin Luther King Jr. weekend. And Warner Bros.’ “Aquaman” is on track to hold on to No. 1 for a third weekend with an estimated $30 million after making $9.4 million on its third Friday.
The result will push the DC film’s domestic total past $250 million, with its global total set to pass $1 billion in the next few days. The movie entered the weekend with a global total of $866 million, and on Friday passed “The Dark Knight Rises” as the highest international grossing DC film with $649 million.
In second on the charts is this weekend’s sole new release, Sony’s low-budget horror film “Escape Room.” Sporting a PG-13 rating and a $9 million budget, the film was projected to score an opening in the low teens this weekend. Currently, “Escape Room” is on pace to perform slightly above that after making $7.7 million from 2,717 screens on Friday, putting it on course for a $16-17 million opening. Critics gave the film a 53 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, while CinemaScore audience polls yielded a B.
Neck-and-neck with “Escape Room” for the No. 2 spot is Disney’s “Mary Poppins Returns,” which is also estimated for a $17 million weekend that will push its domestic total to around $140 million.
Sony’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” and “Bumblebee” complete the top five, each projected for a $13-14 million weekend. “Spider-Verse” is looking at a domestic total of $134 million after four weekends, while “Bumblebee” is behind the pace of “Transformers: The Last Knight” with an estimated three-weekend total of $97 million.
