Once again, the box office finds itself in an early year slump as Amazon MGM’s “Mercy” has ended the reign of “Avatar: Fire and Ash” atop the box office with an industry estimated opening weekend of $12.6 million from 3,468 locations.
The slump is not entirely attributable to Hollywood, as a severe winter storm stretching from Texas to New England is putting two-thirds of the U.S. population under a deep freeze with more than three feet of snow forecast for the northeast. That will keep millions of people from going anywhere, let alone the movie theater.
To get a sense of how much the storm is hurting the box office, one only needs to look at the estimate for the overall weekend total of $58.4 million, a 13% drop from the same weekend in January 2025.
But even without the storm, holiday holdovers “Avatar 3,” “Zootopia 2” and “The Housemaid” would still make up the top 5, and “Mercy” isn’t looking like it will have a lot of legs beyond this weekend. The AI thriller starring Chris Pratt is opening slightly above Lionsgate’s January 2025 thriller “Flight Risk” but is getting panned by critics with a 21% Rotten Tomatoes score. Audience reception is better but not spectacular with a B- on CinemaScore and an 81% RT score.
Meanwhile, Sony/Columbia’s “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” is plummeting fast with an industry estimated second weekend of $3.8 million. That’s a 70% drop from the film’s $12.5 million 3-day opening last weekend.
Even with the nationwide blizzards likely exacerbating the second weekend drop, this sequel is still struggling to reach a $30 million domestic total, which is what the first “28 Years Later” made in its opening weekend alone last summer.
Once again, the few scraps of good news yielded from the charts this weekend go to Disney’s “Zootopia 2.” After a week in which it became Hollywood’s highest grossing animated film ever and earned a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination, the film has now passed the $400 million domestic mark with $5.9 million in its ninth weekend.
