In non-Toy Story 5 weekend box office news, three other new semi-wide releases barely made a peep amid the Pixar sequel’s sky-high opening weekend. Once upon a time, an R-rated Cameron Diaz comedy like Bad Teacher could open with $30 million alongside a $66 million debut for Cars 2, or an Angelina Jolie/James McAvoy R-rated sci-fi action thriller like Wanted could open with $50 million alongside a $63 million opening for WALL-E. Today, any would-be competitor opening as well as the $14-$17 million likes of The Omen 666, Drag Me to Hell, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Tag and Child’s Play against (respectively) Cars, Up, Brave, Incredibles 2 and Toy Story 4 would almost count as aspirational.
In 2026, Focus Features’ Girls Like Girls ($1.6 million in 504 theaters), A24’s The Death of Robin Hood ($2.6 million in 1,760 theaters) and NEON’s Leviticus ($2.75 million in 1,076 theaters) all opened with under $7 million combined. That’s barely above the $6 million debut of Open Road’s Dope in 2015, alongside the $90 million opening for Inside Out and the $108 million second-weekend gross of Jurassic World. All three of them were, to varying degrees, small movies meant to procure a few bucks while they could. Even Hugh Jackman’s revisionist version of revisionist history cost $20 million, for which A24 spent $4 million on domestic distribution.
Concurrently, the online rags selling Leviticus, a grim and mournful melodramatic metaphor for gay conversion therapy, as the next Obsession were frankly doing more harm than good. Moreover, to be fair, a Cars 3 opening of $54 million in 2017 makes it easier for a $24 million opening for the Tupac biopic All Eyez on Me, the $11 million launch of 47 Meters Down, and the $8 million debut of Rough Night. Nonetheless, in 2016, we still had enough room for Finding Dory to open with $136 million and Central Intelligence to debut with $36 million. Most shark movies barely open in theaters, and even most raunchy coms (romantic or otherwise) end up on SVOD platforms.