‘Ready Player One’ Easily Tops Weak Easter Weekend

Really, it was never going to be anything other than this over the past weekend.  Spielberg is perhaps the single most popular director of the past half-century.  Ready Player One was a best-selling novel with a massive, built-in audience.  Easter is a big movie-going weekend where extended families trek to the local multiplex to find something to do for a couple of hours.  And the weekend was far enough away from both Black Panther and Infinity War to only have to suffer through very mild competition.

It was the perfect storm for this movie to carve out its sizable niche in the movie-going world.  Seven weeks in and Black Panther is starting to calm down at the box office.  Although it’s putting up impressive numbers overseas, Americans are as broadly indifferent to Pacific Rim: Uprising as they were to its far better-made predecessor.  While genuinely impressive as both an artistic expression and a piece of commercial entertainment, A Wrinkle in Time hasn’t proven to be the box office juggernaut that some were hoping it to be.  Tomb Raider has proven to be a franchise non-starter, Tyler Parry has nothing on Spielberg and Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs was never going to be a crowd-pleaser.

And so Ready Player One ascended to box office gold in both the earlier and latest moment that it possibly could: a single, shining weekend where an unprecedented combination of factors killed any real competition it had at the movie theater.  The film made over $53 million dollars over its four-day, holiday weekend.  Its nearest competition, Tyler Perry’s Acrimony, made a mere $17 million over the same four-day period.  Black Panther, third coming and in its seventh week of release, gave a strong showing with more than $11 million banked.

This occurrence is likely to repeat itself, too, given just how little is getting released between now and the official start of Summer (ie, whenever the next Avengers movie comes out).  The only sizable release is Rampage, based on the city-stomping arcade game, and the box office is filled with easy picking until then.