Jack Black Hits The Motherlode with "A Minecraft Movie"
It's now easier to turn a video game into a hit film than turn a hit film into a video game.
WORLDWIDE BOX OFFICE FOR WEEK ENDING APRIL 6, 2025
(Credit: Warner Bros.)
Below you'll find a film's gross for the last seven days, followed by its total worldwide gross. If I bold a film's name, that means I've declared it a hit from box office alone. Check out the grosses below, followed by my thoughts on the week, a list of the hit films of 2025 and finally brief notes for every film on the chart, in case you’re wondering what that movie from India or France or South Korea is actually about.
I begin with data from Comscore and then pull from every other source available. Send me an email if you'd like to subscribe or click the button below. Other recent stories:
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– Michael Giltz
mgiltz@pipeline.com
www.michaelgiltz.com
www.popsurfing.com
BOX OFFICE FOR THE LAST SEVEN DAYS
A Minecraft Movie–$313m worldwide debut
Snow White–$25m this week / $168m worldwide total
Ne Zha 2 (China)–$18m / $2.141b ww total
Sikandar (India/Hindi)–$16m / $19m ww total
A Working Man–$14m / $44m ww total
We Girls aka Xiang Yang Hua (China)–$11m total
Mumu aka Bu Shuo Hua De Ai / Silent Love (China)–$10m ww debut
L2: E.M.P.U.R.A.A.N. (India/Malayalam)–$8m / $29m ww
The Chosen: Last Supper Part 1–$7m / $18m ww total
The Woman In The Yard–$7m / $17m ww total
The Chosen: Last Supper Part 2–$7m ww debut
Death of a Unicorn–$6m / $12m ww total
Captain America: Brave New World–$5m /$411m ww total
The River of Fury (China)–$5m / $7m ww total
The Match (Korea)–$5m / $9m ww total
Black Bag–$4m / $35m ww total
Novocaine–$4m / $32m ww total
Dog Man–$3m / $134m ww total
Conclave–$3m / $115m ww
Fox Hunt (China)–$3m ww debut
Go here for the complete chart for this week (including 33 films in all) and every week of 2025.
Bold: movies that have or likely will triple their reported budgets. That's my standard for a movie being a box office hit from theatrical alone.
ANALYSIS
I’m sorry, what was that? I know you were saying something about movie-going being dead and the theatrical biz is toast, but I can’t hear you over the din of popcorn popping and ticket selling for A Minecraft Movie.
Yes, 2025 has its first honest-to-goodness Hollywood blockbuster with this video game turned monster smash franchise starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa. (I know, Momoa is the bigger star but this just feels like a Jack Black project in every way.) I was right in predicting the movie would do much better than the early buzz suggested, but no one predicted it would almost double the most optimistic expectations for the worldwide opening. It cost $150mb and grossed $300m in its opening week, which is a lot of Lego bricks.
China already notched a big budget hit with Detective Chinatown 1900 and plenty of movies costing $80mb (or much less) have scored in 2025. But the box office definitely needs those tentpole flicks to deliver and A Minecraft Movie did that in spades. (Joke!)
Ignore those “best opening for a video game adaptation since…” analyses, which are meaningless. People don’t pick movies that way and movies don’t become hits that way. Minecraft is based on a known property, fans gobbled it up and that’s all there is to say. It’s no Barbie–reviews are middling at best–but a movie doesn’t have to be good to be a hit and fans are pleased.
If I was right about A Minecraft Movie, I was wrong about The Chosen: Last Supper Part 2. I just assumed the next batch of episodes playing movie theaters would gross the same amount as the first batch last week. But no, Part 2 dropped almost 40% from the $11m gross for Part 1. Why? Are they waiting for Part 3? Did they figure out they already knew the ending? In any case, it’s a big winner, with the two parts grossing $25m total so far and Part 3 coming on Friday, leaving lots of time for marathons until Easter.
In India, the melodrama Sikandar actually opened last Sunday, March 30 but I had no info on it, so it wasn’t in my weekly column. It made $3m on its first day and $16m in the seven days since, for a total of $19m and counting. The other big Indian flick of the moment is L2: E.M.P.U.R.A.A.N. It fell about 60% in its second week. So this Mollywood film may be the highest grossing Malayalam language movie in history. But since it’s also the most expensive, it may not be a success from box office alone. Is it the politics of the film? See my note discussing this at #8 below.
China has a quirky coincidence this week. Not one, but two new films opened with main protagonists who are deaf. The first is the prison drama We Girls in which women in prison are released and band together to demand respect! The second is the heart-tugging Mumu, in which a seemingly kind and gentle deaf father of adorable little Mumu is accused of a serious crime. Mumu insists it couldn’t be true! Both films enjoyed decent starts, though I haven’t a clue as to their budgets.
The rest of 2025 will improve by leaps and bounds, though the scheduling is awkward, movies too similar to each other are bunched up and to me December looks barren because everyone is scared of Avatar: Fire and Ash, which opens December 19. (The bold cartoonThe Spongebob Movie: Search for Squarepants is smart counter-programming and opens the same day.) But a 2025 schedule with a lot of big movies and a solid stream of medium and smaller flicks mean the next nine months will be much better than the last three.
On the downside, Steven Soderbergh delivered his most commercial film in years but Black Bag didn’t deliver at the box office. It cost $50mb and only has $35m to date. It doesn’t help that this is a film for adults, adults don’t rush out to the movies and the Cate Blanchett/Michael Fassbender flick hits online now, just EIGHTEEN days after it opened. Even if someone has no interest in spending $20 to rent the film, seeing all those ads for it becoming available at home makes you feel silly paying to see it in a theater. Plus, it hits BluRay just eight weeks after opening. Too soon!
People are ready to go to the movies. How often can big movies deliver and surprise hits come out of nowhere for Hollywood to accept that? But theaters really need to lower their concession prices; it’s annoying to buy a ticket and be asked to spend more on a small popcorn and soda. And studios should wise up and realize a 60 day window is good for everybody. (The “window” is the agreed upon time between a movie’s debut and it becoming available in any form for home viewing. In the old days, a 90 day window was the bare minimum. But the pandemic upended everything; the window for Black Bag is a crazy 18 days.) Disney has it right by keeping films in theaters for at least 60 days and they’re the most successful studio right now. Hint.
Coming this week: The Amateur, an action flick starring Rami Malek as a desk-bound CIA cryptographer who goes rogue and gets all Rambo on the terrorists who killed his wife. (It opens just two weeks before The Accountant 2, a somewhat similar flick with Ben Affleck as an on-the-spectrum math dude turned nerdy bad ass. I mean, surely either flick would have been wiser opening up earlier in the year and having more room to themselves.) Also out this week, the cheesy looking animated Easter film The King of Kings, from faith-based Angel Studios; Warfare, a tense look at Navy SEALS on a mission in Iraq, co-written and co-directed by Alex Garland; and One To One: John & Yoko, a documentary I’ll be reviewing because I love the Beatles.
2025 HIT FILMS
Here's a list of all the hit films making money at the box office in 2025. This week, I’ve added A Minecraft Movie and removed Novocaine, which is fading fast.
Big Budget ($100mb+)
Detective Chinatown 1900 (China) ($125mb est)
A Minecraft Movie ($150mb)
Mid-sized budget ($21mb-$99mb)
Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy ($50mb)
Dog Man ($40mb)
Legend of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants (China) ($30mb)
Ne Zha 2 (China) ($80mb)
Nosferatu ($50mb)
Small Budget ($20mb or less)
Attack On Titan The Movie: The Last Attack (Japan) (no reported budget)
Babygirl ($20mb)
Becoming Led Zeppelin (>$2mb)
The Brutalist ($10mb)
Chhaava (India/Hindu) ($15mb)
The Chosen: Last Supper Part 1, 2 and 3 (TV series episodes; no reported budget)
Companion ($10mb)
Conclave ($20mb)
Dragon (India/Tamil) ($4mb)
I'm Still Here ($2mb)
Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX-Beginning (pulled from epi of tv anime series)
National Theatre: Prima Facie ($?mb)
One of Them Days ($14mb)
Presence ($2mb)
NOTES
mb = a film's budget in millions of US dollars; ww = worldwide
A Minecraft Movie–$150mb. When you double your rather big budget on opening weekend and you’ve wildly exceed expectations, you’ve got a hit on your hands. People trot out meaningless comparisons, like “second-largest opening for a movie based on a video game,” as if audiences ever think that way. It’s a big fat hit! What more needs to be said, except, “Maybe Minecraft 2” could actually be good?” Just a thought.
Snow White–$250mb (or so!) for Disney’s latest live action remake of an animated classic is a rare flop. They’ve also paused the live action remake of Tangled, another animated gem. Oh, I ‘m sure Disney will keep making these retreads. But perhaps they’ll be more deliberate and improve the quality control.
Ne Zha 2–Reported $80mb. Chinese animated fantasy sequel to the 2019 smash which cost about $20m and grossed $743m. A spin-off film Jiang Ziya was hobbled by COVID but grossed $243m. Now we have the direct sequel Ne Zha 2, which cost $80m and finds our spunky heroine (based on a famed mythological character around for centuries) taking on sea monsters. The series is based on Investiture of the Gods by Xu Zhonglin from the 16th century.
Sikandar (India/Hindi)–$23mb for this Indian melodrama with a typically complicated plot about love, complications and organ donations.
A Working Man–$40mb for this John Statham action flick, a red meat, blue collar revenge flick about human trafficking.
We Girls aka Xiang Yang Hua / Sunflower–A Chinese drama about women getting out of prison (including one who is deaf) and banding together to make their way in the world and fight for respect. A thriller? An action-drama? Not quite sure. By the way, the Chinese title translates as Sunflower.
Mumu aka Bu Shuo Hua De Ai / Silent Love–A heart-tugging Chinese drama, this time about a deaf man who is accused of a crime but clearly loves his little girl Mumu and would do anything to stay with her.
L2: E.M.P.U.R.A.A.N.–$21mb for this sequel to 2019’s Lucifer. Indeed, the budget for this Indian sequel is greater than the entire worldwide gross for Lucifer, which topped out at $15m. But since Lucifer only cost $3.5mb to make, this is a reasonable, calculated risk. These two films are successes for the Malayalam film center based in Kerala. Nickname? Mollywood, naturally. The plot of the sequel seems incendiary to me: it’s about Muslims being attacked and killed by Hindus in a politically inspired riot. A surviving Muslim family member vows revenge and there’s a corrupt stand-in for the fascist-leaning, real world BJP Party, led by Narendra Modi, who has ruled India for more than a decade. Does this play all over India? Is it controversial? Or am I not grasping the context for Empuraan? Unless the bottom falls out of the film, it will soon become the highest grossing Malayalam language movie in history. However, that doesn’t mean it will be a hit from theatrical alone. It needs $60m and that’s unlikely now.
The Chosen: Last Supper Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3–This is the specialized theatrical release of episodes from Season 5 of the Biblical TV series The Chosen. So there’s no budget as such (they made it for TV) and the marketing is modest. This is found money, and a lot of it. Not even Game of Thrones at its peak matches this. Very, very impressive.
The Woman In The Yard–A reported $12mb for the latest horror flick from Blumhouse. Everyone is convinced we’ve reached peak horror in 2025, with so many cheap horror flicks scheduled for release that exhaustion will surely set in. But audiences aren’t sick of them yet.
The Chosen: Last Supper Part 2 (see #9)
Death of a Unicorn–This horror/spoof of the 1% cost a very modest $15mb, so it’ll be fine. But mixed reviews and a mild opening in North America keep this out of the winner’s circle so far.
Captain America: Brave New World–$180mb. I expected this to be far less successful than the last two films from Captain America, because those were essentially Avengers movies. But I didn’t expect it to be a total flop.
The River of Fury–A grim Chinese crime drama about a female vet on a pig farm who goes missing. Many blame an evil spirit, which was also seen as the culprit of gruesome crimes against women decades ago. Our hero investigator believes the truth is more evil, more human and close at hand.
The Match–No reported budget for this Korean drama about a Go champion (a complex board game akin to chess) who mentors a young man, only to see the kid later reject his philosophy on how to play! The film has a checkered history (pun!) mostly linked to the talented but controversial actor Yoo Ah-in as the protégé.
Black Bag–$50mb for the Steven Soderbergh thriller starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender.
Novocaine–$18mb for this comic thriller means Jack Quaid is enjoying his second hit film of 2025, after the comic sci-fi flick Companion.
Dog Man–A reported $40mb. It's always good to gross your budget on opening week. Plus, the books are funny, the reviews are good, the audience response is great and it has the rest of the world to open in. So get ready for Dog Man 2.
Conclave–$20mb for this trim, adult drama means the “voting for a new Pope” drama is a serious hit. But it seems the rare case where a sequel is…unlikely.
Fox Hunt–A Chinese crime drama starring Tony Leung in the story of two cops going up against a money-trafficking cartel.
New and notable but not on the chart: Actor Finn Wolfhard of Stranger Things makes his co-writing and co-directing debut with Billy Bryk on the comedy-horror flick Hell of a Summer. It cost just $3mb and opened to $2m so this might hit the winner’s circle if it holds.
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THE CHART AND HOW IT IS COMPILED
This column is a week by week tracking of box office around the world. I compile it by pulling from every possible source: ComScore, Box Office Mojo, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, charts for countries like China and India and South Korea, individual stories in trade or general interest newspapers, Wikipedia and anyone else discussing box office.
ComScore Weekly Global Box Office Chart
The weekly charts contain the total gross for every movie in theaters around the world during the last seven days. Most charts compare the three day grosses (Fri-Sun) of current releases (ignoring all the money they made from Monday to Thursday) to the four day grosses of new releases (since most new releases "preview" on Thursday). Naturally, sometimes movies open on a Wednesday in North America, which means they "preview" on Tuesday. So why not just add up all the money a movie made in the last seven days, whether it opened on a Tuesday or a Thursday or three weeks earlier?
Plus, I look at worldwide box office. Hits appear all over the world, some of them having a big impact in other territories and some flourishing only at home. But they all mint new stars and directors who often go on to help bigger movies in Hollywood and elsewhere. Plus any studio tentpole film depends on the international market, where they often gross most of their money. So focusing only on North America and ignoring the rest of the world is just as foolish as ignoring North American grosses and insisting you only want to know what a movie made in Oklahoma.
How do we arrive at the total gross for a movie over the last seven days? We take the total worldwide box office we have for a movie, subtract from it the previous week's total worldwide box office...and that's how much it made during the past seven days. Naturally, some territories and movies can fall through the cracks but we are as up to date as we can be, given our dependence on other outlets for the basic info.
Any movie grossing at least US $1 million will be on here, if we get info on it. Then I give some thoughts on the box office overall and individual films. That's followed by notes where I give info on each movie, with a focus on films not from Hollywood. So Despicable Me 4 you know. But a small Korean comedy or French drama? That I'll identify for you as best I can.
Which movies get bolded and make the list for The Hit Films of 2025? My rule of thumb is that films should gross roughly three times as much as their reported budget to be called a hit from theatrical alone. Some people now say a movie need only make 2 1/2 times as much as their budget, but I'm sticking with the traditional formula. Of course, we don't really know a movie's budget or the cost of advertising or the backroom deals. And remember, just because a movie isn't a hit from theatrical alone doesn't mean they're losing money. Far from it. So, we can't dive deep into Hollywood accounting. But we can spot the really big hits that will change careers, launch franchises and generally pay the bills. It's harder to get a reported budget on international films so I tend to avoid calling them a hit unless I have info that convinces me they're a winner. Also, I include movies from 2024 if they make the majority of their money in 2025. Finally, I identify the country for non-Hollywood movies to celebrate the worldwide movie biz. I indicate the language Indian films were made in to celebrate that country's diverse industry, which is vibrant and includes more than the Hindi-language Bollywood films Westerners knew best.
– Michael Giltz
mgiltz@pipeline.com
www.michaelgiltz.com
www.popsurfing.com
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