Box Office Report: Bad Boys: Ride or Die Gives Summer 2024 A Financial Jump-Start

The domestic box office was chock full of Collateral Beauty this weekend thanks to the strong opening weekend of Will Smith’s Bad Boys: Ride or Die. The fourth entry in this long-running saga grossed $56 million this weekend. That was down just 11% from the North American bow of the last entry in the franchise. Even more reassuringly for the 2024 box office landscape was that Ride or Die only opened 8% below Transformers: Rise of the Beasts this same weekend last year. Such a minimal dip from Beasts suggests June 2024 newcomers have a chance at hitting the box office highs of various June 2023 titles.

This is in spite of the box office doldrums of May 2024. That month grossed only $549.7 million, the lowest May gross (exempting 2020 and 2021) since 1998. The last two weeks have been packed with editorials grousing about cinema being near-death. However, movie theaters need appealing movies and a steady stream of new feature films to attract moviegoers. When you have no new major studio titles opening in theaters like the cursed May 31-June 2, 2024 frame, the box office suffers. It also doesn’t hurt to have titles aimed at a variety of demographics! Per Deadline, a whopping 70% of Ride or Die’s opening day audience was either Black or Hispanic/Latino. Those are two segments of the population that haven’t been well-serviced by the first month of summer 2024 cinema.

The American film industry needs to realize that movies can not just “break even” even if they don’t solely appeal to cis-het white men over 40. Such titles can also become big blockbusters even if they’re aimed at a demographic considered “niche” by studios. 16 years after Sex and the City: The Movie overperformed because “wow, women go to the movies!” and six years after Black Panther made over half of its gargantuan opening weekend from Black moviegoers, big tentpoles anchored by individuals belonging to marginalized identities are still scarce. Ignoring that reality is how you get the bleak box office of May 2024.

Ride or Die’s debut also provides a welcome reminder to Will Smith that audiences love seeing him in zippier lighter fare. It’s no surprise that his bigger financial misses of the 2010s were grim features like Gemini Man, After Earth, and Collateral Beauty. Not every potential future breezy smith movie will make $56 million on opening weekend. Ride or Die got a boost from being a franchise title, after all. However, the strong performance of this newest Bad Boys reaffirms the mode Smith is most popular in. In other words, the actor needs to anchor more movies like Hitch and fewer like Seven Pounds.

In second place this weekend was fellow Sony/Columbia Pictures release The Garfield Movie, which grossed another $10 million. Over 17 days, this Chris Pratt star vehicle has now grossed $68.6 million domestically. Inside Out 2 will send this one cratering to the ground next weekend. However, Garfield should end its domestic run in the solid neighborhood of $80-85 million. Next on the domestic box office chart was IF. This Ryan Reynolds directorial effort continued its impressive domestic box office run in its fourth weekend of release.

Grossing another $8 million, IF experienced only a 24% decline from last weekend. After an opening weekend that didn't quite match some people's expectations, IF has proven quite resilient in its subsequent frames. If family movie newcomer Inside Out 2 doesn't annihilate it next weekend, IF could be looking at a domestic total just north of $120 million.

Also debuting this weekend was the new horror film The Watchers. The feature functioned as the kick-off to a new deal between Warner Bros. Pictures and M. Night Shyamalan’s production company Blinding Edge Pictures. Here’s to hoping the next collaboration between these studios (the upcoming Josh Hartnett thriller Trap) does better. The Watchers only grossed $7 million over its opening weekend. That’s a strikingly similar bow to another early June horror film, It Comes at Night, though that was an indie film rather than a major studio release marketing by Warner Bros./New Line Cinema. Word-of-mouth on the title isn’t good, so expect this feature to vanish quickly from the marketplace.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes eased 40% this weekend to add another $5.4 million. Having grossed $149.7 million after a little over month, this new Apes installment has surpassed the domestic haul of War for the Planet of the Apes from 2017. Not too shabby. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga had a much sharper drop this weekend, falling a steep 60% in its third frame. Taking in another $4.2 million, this title has only grossed $58.7 million to date. This costly tentpole will struggle to crack $70 million domestically. That’ll put its final North American total at less than half of Mad Max: Fury Road’s haul in the same territory.

Speaking of May 2024 releases, The Fall Guy, now in its sixth weekend of release, scored another $2.7 million this frame. That resulted in a solid 36% decline (or fall, one might say) from last weekend. The Fall Guy continues to have great weekend-to-weekend drops. However, its $140 million budget means it won't be immediately profitable in its theatrical run. The Fall Guy has now accumulated $85.1 million domestically.

Last weekend's newcomers didn't fare too well in their respect second weekend of release. Haikyu!! The Movie: Decisive Battle at the Garbage Dump, for instance, plummeted 77% in its second weekend. In its defense, that's an admittedly standard decline for many Crunchyroll releases. This motion picture now has a $5.7 million domestic total. In a Violent Nature fell off 70% this frame to gross another $640,000. Clearly, this title won't be as leggy as the last breakout IFC Films/Shudder release, Last Night with the Devil. With $3.6 million after just ten days of release, though, this grisly horror movie is already a tidy moneymaker for IFC. It's also already the 13th-biggest IFC Films release in history domestically.

Ezra, meanwhile, found no salvation from its dismal opening weekend and plummeted 70% this weekend. This Bobby Cannavale feature grossed only another $370,093 this weekend for a $2.1 million 10-day total.

In the limited release sphere, I Saw the TV Glow had another impressive weekend-to-weekend hold. Dipping only 31%, I Saw the TV Glow grossed another $261,821 for a $4.19 million domestic haul. Can it make another $800,000 to crack the $5 million mark domestically? It certainly seems possible at this point. That would be a mighty fine finish for this feature. It would also make it the second-biggest limited release domestically of 2024 so far, only behind fellow A24 title Love Lies Bleeding.

In its second weekend of release, Oscar-nominated feature Robot Dreams expanded to seven locations. There, it grossed another $53,624 for a $7,661 per-theater average. This title has now grossed $100,419 after ten days of domestic play.

Nine months after its Telluride Film Festival premiere, Tuesday debuted in just two theaters this weekend. It grossed $25,665, a fine though not extraordinary haul. This one doesn't seem poised for a long run. However, it's also a quiet meditation on grieving and loss. Those can sometimes be a tough sell for audiences. Tuesday expands into more theaters Friday, June 14. Also opening in limited release this weekend was I Used to Be Funny, a new comedy from iconic comedic performer (whoops, writer bias sneaking in there) Rachel Sennott.

The feature grossed $15,054 from just one theater. That's 10% behind the $17,277 opening weekend of Femme, another recent Utopia-distributed release that also opened in just one theater. Already the 20th biggest Utopia release in history, I Used to Be Funny could make a run at a $150,000+ domestic finish if Femme is any indication.

Oh, and finally, and arguably most importantly, let's look at how Hundreds of Beavers is doing in its domestic box office run. This indie feature has been running a roadshow-style release across America since the final weekend of January 2024. Box office figures aren't in for its June 7-9, 2024 grosses (its 20th weekend of release). However, last weekend, it took in another $8,879 from just nine theaters. As of last Sunday, it's now taken in $394,958 despite never playing in more than 24 theaters at one time. Never underestimate the power of beavers. Ever.

The top ten biggest movies domestically this weekend grossed a combined total of around $97 million. Almost all of that moolah came from just the $56 million opening weekend of Bad Boys: Ride or Die. That's an improvement on four of the five weekends in May 2024. Alas, that sum is also down 41% from the same weekend last year. The summer 2024 box office is getting back into gear, but we need more movies to improve things. Thankfully, the comparisons between summer 2024 and 2023 will get better in the next few weeks. Case in point: this coming frame will be dominated by Inside Out 2. Unless something goes horribly wrong, that Pixar sequel will easily top the debut of last year’s big mid-June tentpole, The Flash. Let's hope Bad Boys: Ride or Die is the start of a rebound for summer 2024 rather than an anomaly.

Box office figures for this piece originated from The-Numbers