Our number one movie may be Hoppers, but our number one story is The Bride!, which has rapidly turned into a box office flop for the ages. Against a budget which may have ranged anywhere from $80 million-$100 million (looking at the production values, I’d be inclined to believe the latter number), the “horror movie” (or whatever it is) made only $13 million worldwide. Read that again. The Bride! opened to only $13 million worldwide. And that was in 70 global markets. What the fuck.

“It’s not alive! It’s not alive!” The jokes just write themselves here, don’t they? From the moment it was announced, The Bride! sounded perplexing, and the marketing didn’t do much to sooth that confusion. Just who was this movie for? “Here comes the MOTHERFUCKING BRIDE!” It came across as the cinematic equivalent of being a tryhard (a term I normally hate using, but hey, it fits in this case). And despite the “feminist” aspects of the film being front-and-center in all the media coverage, more men reportedly bought tickets this weekend than women. Not that it really matters, since most of those theaters were empty.

Stateside, The Bride! could commit to just $7 million (which makes it global total sound even worse, considering that accounted for more than half of it). I’m not sure if it would’ve helped, but critical appraisal is something a multi-genre arthouse tentpole benefits from, and such was not the case here. Reviews were highly mixed for the film, and even those who liked it more-or-less proclaimed it to be a mess. Yes, “Bonnie & Clyde with monsters” sounds like a fun pitch on paper, until you realize very few young people have ever seen Bonnie & Clyde. Can The Bride! be saved? No. No, it can’t. No level of word-of-mouth (which is terrible so far, by the way) is going to be able to resurrect this one from the dead.

But let’s move on to some good news. Hoppers hopped to a healthy $46 million, which technically is the best opening for a Pixar original since Coco (mind you, that film opened over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, so it’s not really an apt comparison). After last year’s Elio caused everyone in the entertainment press to hit the panic button over animated non-sequels, the success of this beaver feature has to be seen as a dam relief.

That said, it’s kind of depressing this is the bar now. There was a time when Pixar films would regularly open to over $60 million. Heck, even DreamWorks Animation’s Home stunned by premiering to $55 million in March of 2015. When Rango opened to “only” $38 million in 2011, it was viewed as disappointing. Nowadays, that would be considered a strong start. Can we blame this on the post-COVID era? Is streaming at fault? Or can we simply admit that, yes, movie tickets cost too fucking much now? If a family of four goes to Hoppers even at matinee prices, they are likely to spend more than $60 even before purchasing concessions. For what it’s worth, this hurts stuff like The Bride! as well. It’s absolutely insane that theater chains allowed for this to happen.

Anyway, the top ten, via Box Office Mojo (as an aside, Demon Slayer randomly came back to theaters this weekend and made it into the top ten)