And then, suddenly, it rained.
After three months of dreary box office numbers, the domestic box office got a massive boost that basically came from out of nowhere. When A Minecraft Movie first appeared on tracking, it was projected to hit $55 million over its first three-day opening weekend. That sounded like a decent result for a title that had been plagued with problems. The initial teaser trailer was despised by everyone and even procured over a million dislikes on YouTube. At the outset of 2025, the latest Jared Hess directorial effort seemed destined to become one of the years biggest box office flops.
How things can change in a week. Box office analyst Shawn Robbins noted that A Minecraft Movie’s advanced ticket sales absolutely exploded in just the last seven days before its release. Tracking service Quorum, meanwhile, saw awareness for A Minecraft Movie more than double over its final week of pre-release marketing. These incredible trends preceded an opening weekend that, good Lord, nobody saw being this big. A Minecraft Movie opened to a staggering $157 million, the biggest non-Marvel domestic opening weekend ever in April. Furious 7’s $147 million debut has held that record for ten years, but it took Steve and a “chicken jockey” to surpass that James Wan movie.
Minecraft also came in above the $146.4 million three-day weekend bow of The Super Mario Bros. Movie (which did burn off demand with a Wednesday launch) to score the biggest video game movie launch ever. An appropriate win for a film based on the best-selling video game movie of all time. This is also another massive win for Jack Black, whose been just on fire as a leading man for kid-friendly movies in the last decade. After just three days, , only behind King Kong's $218.08 million domestic haul.
After just three days, this is also by far the biggest movie ever domestically for director Jared Hess. Heck, Minecraft's opening day alone exceeded everything he's ever made domestically except for Nacho Libre's $80.19 million domestic haul. A Minecraft Movie is also a welcome balm of light for distributor and financier Warner Bros. For the last year, only Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has stood out for the studio as a moneymaker. With A Minecraft Movie, though, WB has a gigantic hit which drove its success from appealing to an underserved audience in 2025 cinema: kids and teens. After so many months of R-rated action films, here was a PG comedy that younger folks could go see on their own.
Back in 1990, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came out of nowhere (also in the springtime, weirdly enough) to become one of the year's highest grossing movies. Five years earlier, The Care Bears Movie outgrossed movies today considered classics like To Live and Die in L.A., Clue, and After Hours. When you make a major movie about characters and a world that belongs to the current generation of kids, gigantic box office results tend to follow. Though A Minecraft Movie was buoyed by distinctly modern marketing elements like TikTok virality, its success echoes those Turtles and Care Bears of years past. Hollywood’s 2020s obsession with trying to squeeze the last nickels out of Kevin Costner and Mark Wahlberg’s “star power” has alienated the younger moviegoers that have always been critical to a healthy box office landscape. Let’s see if A Minecraft Movie inspires more youth-skewing movies…and not just dumb knock-offs like Robolox: The Movie starring Adam Sandler.
One final Minecraft note: this movie solidifies that the video game movie has well and truly arrived. Now that this domain is both making titles based on the most popular video games of all time (rather than Prince of Persia) and delivering movies aimed at younger audiences, this subgenre's absolutely taken off. The Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Five Nights at Freddy's, they've all soared in the last five years. Heck, even Uncharted managed to exceed $400 million worldwide. It's so funny to think that current generations won't know a world where the concept of video game movies being box office poison was common knowledge. With more Freddy's and Mario installments, plus a Zelda movie, on the horizon, the video game movie is just getting warmed up.
A Working Man clearly won’t be as leggy as The Beekeeper as it fell 53% this frame to gross another $7.27 million. That’s not a bad second weekend decline all things considered and with $27.8 million after just ten days of release, it's hard to imagine anyone involved in financing this film is complaining. The Chosen: Last Supper — Part 2 was not as big as its direct predecessor last weekend but it still took in a solid $6.7 million from 2,296 theaters. Not holding as well as Working Man this frame. On the other hand, Snow White fell another worrisome 58% this weekend to gross another $.608 million for a disastrous 17-day domestic total of $77.46 million. $100+ million domestically is now out of reach of this box office dud.
The Woman in the Yard fell 52% this weekend, adding $4.5 million for a $16.66 million domestic total. In its second frame, Death of a Unicorn dropped 53% and added $2.69 million for a $10.78 million domestic total. The Chosen: Last Supper — Part 1 is still out there, though it fell 84% as its "sequel" hit the marketplace. It still grossed another $1.86 million for a $17.9 million domestic total, making it the biggest non-Coraline movie ever from Fathom Events. Neon's been on a hot streak lately, but even they can't be spotless in their track record. The distributor’s new wide release title Hell of a Summer had a middling $1.75 million launch. Meh reviews and a lack of marketing, not to mention so many horror films on the marketplace, ensured Summer’s box office fate.
First Sony Classics didn't capsize The Penguin Lessons last weekend, now Bleecker Street actually got an okay wide release start for a new movie. I'm feeling like Bart and Lisa when Homer turned out to be right about that comet dissipating in the atmosphere! The Friend didn't break out in its wide release expansion, but it did gross a fine $1.61 million from 1,237 locations for a $1,308 per theater average. It’s now grossed $1.69 million domestically. Captain America: Brave New World fell 52% this week for antoher $1.39 million and a $199.12 million domestic total. It'll surpass $200 million domestically next weekend. Amusingly, A Minecraft Movie might get to the mark before Brave New World!
Black Bag dropped 57% this weekend after losing 1,254 theaters. Grossing another $950,000, it's now grossed $20.65 million, making it the fourth consecutive Focus Features title to crack $20+ million domestically. Princess Mononoke lost most of its IMAX screens this weekend, but GKIDS also brought it to general theaters. Playing in 630 locations, it grossed $617,342. Mononoke has now grossed $16.87 million domestically across its various re-releases. The Penguin Lessons had a good opening last weekend, but suffered a worrisome 66% plummet this frame for another $400,000 and a $2.21 million 10-day domestic total.
The Ballad of Wallis Island expanded into 41 locations and grossed $200,000 for a $,878 per theater average. It's now grossed $323,000 after ten days of release. Opening 81 locations, A Nice Indian Boy grossed $176,000 for a $21,73 per theater average. The Encampments expanded into 46 locations and grossed $110,477 for a $2,402 per theater average and a ten-day total of $221,060. Gazer opened to $13,900 from a single theater this frame, while When Fall is Coming debuted to $6,000 also at one theater.
While March 2025's various frames were an obscene fraction of what normal modern March weekends gross, this kick-off to April 2025 was a monstrous beast. The entire marketplace grossed $190 million, the fifth-biggest April weekend ever domestically. That's also bigger than the last three domestic weekends of 2025 COMBINED. This single April 2025 frame is nearly half of March 2025's entire $397.46 million domestic haul. After weeks and weeks of people asking if theatrical moviegoing is dead (such worries even permeated CinemaCon this past week), the answer is a resounding no. Sorry Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, but people will come to the theater when there’s something they want to see.
Most exciting of all, though, is that the rest of the month doesn’t look like a March 2022 scenario where The Batman ruled over three weekends with no other movies putting up remotely significant grosses. Sinners is on the way for the April 18-20, 2025 frame while The Accountant 2 and the Revenge of the Sith re-issue are tracking well for the month’s final weekend. April 2025 is looking strong as heck and that immediately transitions to summer 2025, which is crammed full of movies aimed at the younger audiences who came out in droves for Wicked, Barbie, Inside Out 2, and A Minecraft Movie.
This is the oddest thing. April 2025’s first weekend really does feel like an extension of November/December 2024’s tremendous box office momentum, propelled by Wicked/Moana 2/Sonic the Hedgehog 3/Mufasa: The Lion King. It’s just that, in between, there was a three month void full of R-rated movies audiences weren’t interested in. Studios need to fill up theaters with more movies of all genres. Any box office downturn is an issue with the product, not people’s ambivalence to theatrical moviegoing. It’s downright disgusting that movie theater owners are forced to deal with such vacant and restrictive (where are the comedies and rom-com’s Hollywood?) slates of new movies when something like A Minecraft Movie clearly indicates there’s a passionate moviegoing audience out there.