Notice: All forms on this website are temporarily down for maintenance. You will not be able to complete a form to request information or a resource. We apologize for any inconvenience and will reactivate the forms as soon as possible.

Ready Player One Nabs High Score

The movie’s all about the quest for an elusive, and extraordinarily important, video game Easter egg. It was released on Easter weekend. So maybe it’s only fitting that Ready Player One rolled to victory in the box office’s own Easter-egg hunt.

Steven Spielberg’s return to flat-out popcorn fare proved to be all sunny-side up this weekend. Released a day early, Ready Player One has already earned $53.2 million during its first four days of box-office life, and it scored an estimated $41.2 million of that during the traditional three-day weekend. That’s the highest North American gross for a Spielberg movie since the director last handed Harrison Ford a fedora and whip (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) in 2008.

And as healthy as the numbers are stateside, that’s nothing compared to how Ready Player One is performing overseas, where it’s already earned $128 million. Game over? Not by a longshot. Looks like the film could be coasting toward an extra life.

Tyler Perry’s Acrimony, another newcomer, finished a distant second to Ready Player One. It overcame some middling reviews to clear about $17.1 million. (We didn’t get an advance screening for Acrimony, but we’ll be posting our review late today or early tomorrow.)

Black Panther may not be No. 1 anymore, but it still continues to rake in the cash. The highest-grossing superhero movie in history made another $11.3 million, bringing its overall North American earnings mark to a staggering $650.7 million. That’s the fifth highest domestic gross in history, and puts Panther less than $2 million behind Jurassic World for fourth.

I Can Only Imagine continues to impress as well, albeit on a different scale. It’s still loitering around the box office’s top five, collecting around $10.8 million to finish fourth. Its overall haul now stands at $55.6 million—not Black Panther-like numbers, obviously, but given the film just cost $7 million to make, according to Box Office Mojo, not too shabby.

By the way, God’s Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness, didn’t fare nearly so well. Maybe the Christian movie audience was just all movied out. The third Christian flick to roll wide in three weeks, God’s Not Dead 3 managed to bank just $2.6 million to finish 12th, way off the pace of its predecessors. (The original God’s Not Dead, released in 2014, earned $9.2 million in its first weekend en route to a $60.8 million overall gross.) The other Christian film in wide release, Paul, Apostle of Christ, finished 10th with $3.5 million.

Pacific Rim Uprising, last weekend’s champ, tumbled all the way down to fifth place. It pocketed $9.2 million—a lot for you and me, maybe, but not so much for gigantic nuclear-powered robots and their massive commensurate supporting staff. Why, that’s barely enough to pay for the paperwork alone.