Weekend Wrap-Up: SpongeBob and Unhinged Kick Off the Theatrical Comeback

August 18, 2020

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run

The release of two major new movies in Canada at the weekend gave us a first chance to see how the box office might recover in North America as theaters open up. The results are not particularly encouraging, although they are in line with our analysis earlier this month.

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run earned first place on the weekend box office chart, but did so with a mere $866,000 in 300 theaters. Even taking into account the smaller size of the Canadian market and if we used the most severe the limitations imposed on ticket sales due to the pandemic, this is still less than what the previous film in the franchise opened with back in 2015. On the other hand, this does make some sense. As we saw with Onward, families were the first to abandon movie theaters back when the pandemic first started, so perhaps they will be the last group to return and will only do so when they are 100% sure it is safe. There might be pent up demand for family films, but not enough demand to overcome the risk.

Unhinged did do better, relatively speaking, with $601,000 in 299 theaters, which is much more than it was expected to do at the box office. The film was aimed at an older, and therefore less cautious, target audience than Sponge on the Run. Maybe this is a good sign for its opening in the United States this weekend. Canadians are more cautious than Americans, culturally speaking, so maybe moviegoers will be more willing to go to theaters, despite the much higher per capita rate of new COVID-19 cases there.

Last week’s winner, The Tax Collector, was pushed into third place with $182,000 in 138 theaters over the weekend for a two-week total of $613,000. This was down 41%, which is higher than most pandemic era releases have suffered. You might want to chalk that up to the competition, but Sponge on the Run and Unhinged opened exclusively in Canada, so that can’t be a real factor. The movie was critically panned, so word-of-mouth is likely the culprit here.

Filed under: Weekend Wrap-up, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, The Tax Collector, Unhinged, SpongeBob SquarePants