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In a Realm With No Theaters, King of Staten Island Reigns Supreme

OK, so the headline was a bit of an exaggeration. A handful of theaters are open in North America—joined by a few more every week—and the movies that land there are now pushing their weekend earnings into six-figure territory. In fact, this weekend there was a bona fide box-office showdown at the top: The horror movie Followed earned $107,475 to “win” the weekend, with Bella Thorne’s salacious caper flick Infamous finishing second with $104,000. Miss Juneteenth finished a distant third with $24,500, but only in six theaters. That gives it a per-theater gross of nearly $4,100, which would be quite respectable in even a normal movie season.

But obviously, those North American totals are still far, far, far lower than we’d typically see. With the traditional box office still tightly sequestered behind a COVID-stifling mask, we find that the real cinematic mover this weekend just might be a depressed twentysomething drug user from the Empire State.

The King of Staten Island, a semi-serious comedy directed by Judd Apatow and starring Pete Davidson, dominated the streaming and video rental charts for the second-straight week. It topped FandangoNOW’s video-on-demand list and iTunes’ top video rental list. Over at Amazon it was the highest-rated film, too (though it lagged behind seasons 1 and 3 of Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone).

Kevin Bacon’s horror flick You Should Have Left showed some teeth as well. It was No. 2 on FandangoNOW, beating out longtime holdovers Scoob!, Trolls World Tour and The Invisible Man, and it was third on iTunes (just behind the latest Charlie’s Angels reboot, of all things).

Meanwhile overseas, where the movie business shows a few more signs of normalcy, Deadline noted that Little Women has taken Japan by storm. The film (which opened late last year in the United States, of course) opened at No. 1 there with nearly a half-million dollars, and it’s now earned more than $100 million overseas.  Elsewhere in the world, Pixar’s Onward is trying to recoup some of the potential earnings that were obliterated by the coronavirus: it earned nearly $1.2 million in South Korea last week, just behind the Korean flick Gyul-Baek. (It’s doing quite well in Norway and Poland too, in case you’re interested.)