Posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2020 by Hoai-Tran Bui
It’s a tale as old as time: re-release Beauty and the Beast in theaters, and it will take the top spot. But this time, it’s the live-action Beauty and the Beast, and the theaters are a handful of drive-ins and local cinemas that are still open during pandemic times. Disney kept its stranglehold on the top spots of the pandemic box office this past weekend, with reissues of 2017’s Beauty and the Beast and Marvel’s Iron Man taking the number one and number 2 spots, respectively.
This past weekend sould’ve been the date that Christopher Nolan’s Tenet flung open the doors of movie theaters across the country and revived the declining box office numbers. But, that was not meant to be, and instead audiences were treated to reissues of Disney’s live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast. The 2017 live-action remake starring Emma Watson and Dan Stevens was re-released in 527 locations, taking in an estimated $467, 000, according to Deadline. This brings Beauty and the Beast‘s lifetime total to an estimated $504.5 million, just another cherry on top of the live-action remake’s record-breaking run.
Following closely behind was Marvel Studios’ Iron Man, which raked in $430,000 at 462 locations. With these two top-performing re-releases, Disney maintains its power at the pandemic box office, ruling the last weekend too, with Empire Strikes Back at number one, Marvel’s Black Panther at number two with an estimated $110,000 at 336 locations, and Pixar’s Inside Out with $106,000 at 316 locations. Disney is doing well since joining the re-release game in early July, with re-releases of family-friendly hits like Zootopia and superhero blockbusters like The Avengers consistently taking the top spots.
Deadline reports that between 1,200 and 1,500 movie theaters were open this past weekend out of the nation’s 5,000 total. It’s been 18 weekends since major theater chains AMC, Regal, and Cinemark closed, and drive-ins have been the main source of the pandemic box office numbers ever since. Per a Comscore report, the leading drive-ins over the weekend were the Fort Wyoming in Dearborn, MI; Cine-Drive in Saint Eustache, Quebec; the Mission Tiki 4 in Montclair, CA; the Van Buren 3 in Riverside, CA; and the Starlight 4 in Atlanta, GA.
But a few new releases have been doing fairly well, with horror movies thriving in particular. IFC is keeping afloat with genre releases like The Wretched, which has now grossed $1.7 million, and Relic, which is approaching $1 million. The new Dave Franco-directed horror movie The Rental got a pop-up drive-in screening in partnership with Arclight Cinemas on June 18, and could crack next weekend’s pandemic box office with the positive critical buzz it’s getting.
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