Raya And The Last Dragon earns the weekend box office’s top spot with $8.6M

Raya and the Last Dragon topped the box office at movie theaters as New York City welcomed back customers for the first time in nearly a year this weekend.  

Disney’s computer-animated fantasy adventure, starring Kelly Marie Tran, Gemma Chan and Sandra Oh, however opened to just $8.6 million from 2,045 screens. 

The lackluster ticket sales are a reflection of how even big-budget releases are struggling to sell tickets amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. 

Raya failed to match the impressive (for a pandemic) debut of Tom & Jerry, which earned $14.1 million last weekend, providing a ray of hope to the long-suffering exhibition sector. 

Raya and the Last Dragon was also made available to Disney Plus subscribers for a $30 fee, a method that the company previously deployed with Mulan.

Though a fraction of what the family movie would make in pre-coronavirus  times, Raya did capture the top spot on domestic box office charts. 

Globally, Raya raked in $26 million with China and Russia providing the largest contributions with $8.4 million and $2.8 million, respectively, while animated features tend to cost substantially more than $100 million to produce. 

This shows skewed the world of theatrical distribution has become that a major Disney release would fail to crack $10 million at the box office in its opening weekend.

Some of that has to do with Disney’s refusal to give exhibitors a better cut of the box office revenues, with Cinemark and other chains refusing to screen the movie.

In its second weekend of release, Warner Bros.’ Tom & Jerry picked up $6.6 million domestically, pushing its haul to $23 million. The film is also streaming on HBO Max. 

Warner Bros. is releasing its entire 2021 slate on the service at the same time the movies open in theaters, a move that shows the growing importance of streaming to media companies.

Tom & Jerry earned $11.6 million globally from 36 markets, pushing its worldwide gross to $57.3 million.

Lionsgate’s Chaos Walking, an oft-delayed and critically maligned fantasy adventure with Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, grossed an anemic $3.8 million for a third-place finish. 

Chaos Walking, which is based on a series of popular sci-fi novels, cost a reported $100 million to make, which is bad news for the studio given the paltry opening. 

It was originally scheduled to debut in March 2019, before it underwent reshoots.

The top five was rounded out by Focus Features’ Boogie, a drama about a Queens basketball phenom that was written and directed by chef and author Eddie Huang, as well as by Dreamworks Animation’s The Croods: A New Age.

Boogie grossed $1.2 million, while the Croods sequel picked up $780,000 to push its domestic gross to $53.6 million. The Croods: A New Age has grossed $157.7 million worldwide since opening last fall.

With vaccinations increasing and rates of coronavirus dropping, several markets such as Chicago, Portland and New York have slowly reopened movie theaters in recent weeks. 

Many of these are operating at reduced capacity, but the loosening of restrictions is fueling some optimism that business could begin to look robust by the middle of the summer, a time when studios historically release some of their biggest movies. 

But as this weekend’s disappointing results show, movie theaters still face a long, hard road to recovery.