1. Bad Boys for Life (review)- $59.1M/$68M
The Bad Boys came out to play in a big way this MLK weekend. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s Bad Boys for Life, the franchise’s first movie since 2003, opened huge with $59M with an estimated $68M through the four-day weekend. Worldwide the buddy cop film has $106M. This is the biggest January debut ever for a newly released film, excluding the $89M expansion of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. This couldn’t have come at a better time for Will Smith, who has been teetering lately. Sure, he scored with Disney’s Aladdin, but that wasn’t really about him. Gemini Man, on the other hand, was pretty much all on his shoulders and we saw how that went. The long-running Bad Boys movies leaned hard on his star power, and of course a healthy amount of nostalgia. But I would argue the smartest thing Sony did was to reinvent the film in a way that resembled Fast & Furious, setting it up for a long future of potential blockbuster sequels.
2. Dolittle (review)- $22.5M/$30M
Poor Robert Downey Jr. It’s not like he’s done a bunch of non-Marvel movies lately. The last one was 2014’s mostly-forgotten The Judge ($84M), and now his longtime pet project, Dolittle, rolls over with just $22.5M and $30M through the MLK holiday. That wouldn’t be so bad if the reviews were better, or if it didn’t cost a ridiculous $175M do to extensive reshoots, but the reality is what it is. This one has had disaster written all over it for a long time, and only got worse when horror stories from the set started to emerge that trashed director Stephen Gaghan. The decision to hire him, when his claim to fame is serious dramas like Traffic and Syriana, made no sense in the first place.
3. 1917– $22.1M/$76.7M
4. Jumanji: The Next Level– $9.5M/$270.4M
5. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker– $8.3M/$492M
6. Just Mercy– $6M/$19.6M
7. Little Women– $5.9M/$84.4M
8. Knives Out– $4.3M/$145.9M
9 Like a Boss– $3.8M/$16.9M
10. Frozen 2– $3.7M/$464.8M
