Luke Hobbs and Deckard Shaw have never liked each other much. But when did a little mutual loathing ever get in the way of success?
Hobbs & Shaw’s titular characters stopped bickering long enough to push aside The Lion King and take the weekend’s box office win. The film—the latest in the Fast & the Furious franchise—stepped on the gas and roared to an estimated $60.8-million North-American debut. Experts say Hobbs & Shaw made nearly twice that much overseas, which would fatten its overall coffers to about $180 million (and some spare change). That just might be enough to encourage Hobbs and Shaw to tolerate each other’s faces long enough for a sequel.
While The Lion King slid to second, weep not for Disney’s fiscally fruitful feline. The Lion King’s $38.2 million weekend take pushed its total domestic box-office tally to $430.9 million. That makes it 2019’s second-biggest money-making movie—leapfrogging fellow Disney properties Captain Marvel ($426.8 million) and Toy Story 4 ($410.1 million) for the honors. It’s not gonna catch the year’s biggest movie, Avengers: Endgame, unless something seriously crazy happens, but no worries: The Lion King has proved that it ain’t no passing craze.
Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood earned $20 million and finished third in no-doubt fashion—trailing The Lion King by more than $18 million and outdistancing the rest of the field by more than $12 million.
The fight for fourth place was a wee bit closer. Spider-Man: Far From Home managed to edge out Toy Story 4 by the width of (an admittedly hefty) plastic spork, earning $7.8 million to Toy Story’s $7.2 million. Pixar’s animated film is now spending its seventh weekend in the top five, and it continues to do well overseas, too. In fact, Toy Story 4 has now earned a total of around $959 million. If it earns “just” $41 million more, it’ll become the fifth movie this year to earn more than $1 billion globally.
Will Hobbs & Shaw be able to hold onto the top spot? That’s a pretty good question, actually. A whopping five wide-release films are going to take aim at the Fast & Furious’ bellicose buddies. And even when you’re as muscle-bound as these two guys, that’s a lot of cinematic horsepower to take on.
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