It’s Disney’s first new release in theaters since the pandemic began.
The weekend box office went on hiatus a few weeks after Tenet faltered at the box office, but with theaters re-opening (with capacity restrictions) in New York, and likely to be reopening in Los Angeles soon, the box-office is slowly returning to life. In fact, last weekend, Tom and Jerry had the biggest opening weekend of 2021 — and one of the biggest of the pandemic — with $14.1 million, despite also being offered for free to HBO Max subscribers and getting terrible reviews. Meanwhile, Disney has re-released a number of films since the beginning of the pandemic (Guardians of the Galaxy, Toy Story, etc.), and they have moved a few films to Disney+ (Soul, Artemis Fowl), and they have even offered one film at premium pricing (Mulan). However, this weekend, Disney released its first new film into theaters since Onward, although Raya and the Last Dragon was also offered on Disney+ for $30. So how’d it go? It’s a mixed bag. It earned a decent $8.3 million in theaters, although I suspect that the film did considerably better on Disney+, since it was being promoted to the streamers’ roughly 100 million subscribers (HBO Max, meanwhile, has only 37 million subs). That’s slightly less than expectations, which was a $9 million opening weekend. There were a number of factors in play, however, that would have made it more difficult to beat Tom and Jerry — aside from the fact that the premium cost was heavily promoted — namely the fact that Disney made no deals with Cinemark, the #3 chain in America and that it’s not based on a familiar property. The mediocre box-office numbers are less a worry for Disney, however, than they are for movie theaters.
