Box Office: Brad Pitt’s ‘Bullet Train’ Arrives With $30M Debut

Bullet Train, a John Wick-ian game starring Brad Pitt, hit theaters with a $30.1 million opening weekend. That’s enough to top the domestic box office, but given Bullet Train’s $90 million price tag and Pitt’s star power, that’s only a mediocre result. The Sony Pictures release needs to maintain momentum in the coming weeks as it attempts to break even or turn a profit.

Bullet Train tries to prove that an action flick not based on a comic book or toy line can defy the odds and resonate with audiences. But part of the problem for the film is that critics weren’t on board. Bullet Train scored a mediocre 41% on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, with many reviewers complaining that the film was too derived from the work of Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino. diversity Chief film critic Peter Debruge was mixed about Bullet Train, writing that “neither the characters nor the film they live in are particularly deep”.

Bullet Train was directed by David Leitch, who once acted as Pitt’s stunt double before directing Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2. It centers on a hapless killer whose mission to steal a suitcase full of cash on a bullet train in Japan devolves into double-crossing and brutal combat with an army of competing killers, thieves and social deviants.

Universal and Amblin’s “Easter Sunday,” the weekend’s other big release, stumbled in its opening picture, earning a meager $5.3 million for an eighth spot on the domestic charts. In “Easter Sunday,” stand-up comic Jo Koy plays an actor who attends his broken Filipino-American family’s Easter Sunday celebration. The good news for Universal and Amblin is that “Easter Sunday” was a modest bet with a $17 million price tag.

“DC League of Super-Pets,” an animated offering from Warner Bros., took second place with $11.2 million. After two weeks, Super-Pets has a domestic gross of $45.1 million, a disappointing result given the $90 million production budget. Under its new ownership, Warner Bros. Discovery is attempting to shake up its cinematic universe of DC Comics characters, a change of course that led to the company’s controversial decision this week to discontinue Batgirl upon the film’s completion. Instead of debuting on HBO Max as originally planned or being retrofitted for a theatrical release, the film is now becoming a tax write-off.

Universal’s “Nope” came in third place with $8.5 million. That brings Jordan Peele’s twisted UFO thriller to $97.9 million at the domestic box office, an impressive result for a film like Bullet Train that wasn’t derived from a pre-existing piece of IP. Disney and Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder and Universal’s and Illumination’s Minions: Rise of Gru rounded out the top five, earning $7.6 million and $7.1 million, respectively. That brings the US total for the Thor sequel to $316.1 million, while the Despicable Me spin-off has now earned $334.6 million domestically.

Limited edition, Bodies Bodies Bodies grossed $226,526 across 6 screens in New York and Los Angeles for an average of $37,754 per screen. The A24 horror film follows a group of rich 20-year-olds at a hurricane party at a remote family home that becomes the scene of much bloodshed. The ensemble cast includes former “SNL” star Pete Davidson, “The Hate U Give” actress Amandla Stenberg and “Borat 2” escapee Maria Bakalova.

On the milestone front, Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick ousted Titanic as the seventh-biggest film of all time at the domestic box office, grossing $662 million in ticket sales. The sequel, now in its eleventh week of release, added $7 million to her total.

The domestic box office has seen an impressive upswing in recent months; It’s a resurgence fueled by hits like Top Gun: Maverick and Jurassic World: Dominion. The bad news for theaters is that Bullet Train is the last major big-budget studio film this summer and will be a veritable desert in terms of populist fare. Studio heads and theater owners privately say there won’t be another blockbuster until Black Panther: Wakanda Forever opens on November 11. That’s a long wait, especially for an exhibitions industry still trying to shake off the lingering effects of COVID closures and reduced attendance.