Everything, Everywhere’ Passes $50 Million, Becomes A24’s Top Grosser

With another $889,738 on Friday, a drop of just 3% from last Friday, Everything, Everywhere All at Once has now earned $50.17 million domestic. That puts it just over $6,000 away from passing Adam Sandler’s Uncut Gems ($50.023 million in late 2019/early 2020). Once it does so, by the end of this sentence, it’ll be A24’s biggest domestic earner, even accounting for inflation. Give or take overseas updates tomorrow, it will rank fourth among A24-specific films at the worldwide box office (although A24 is almost entirely a domestic-centric distribution outlet), behind Moonlight ($65 million), Lady Bird ($79 million) and Hereditary ($81 million), but give it a few weeks, right?

The Daniels’ $25 million multiverse fantasy should earn around $3.2 million (-3%) in weekend nine (its seventh weekend of semi-wide release) for a new $52.327 million cume. That will put it just below Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci ($53.8 million). Once it passes that Lady Gaga/Adam Driver melodrama, it’ll have earned more than any of last year’s Oscar-season hopefuls save for Dune ($108 million). While it’s still not quite as leggy as The Greatest Showman and The Sixth Sense, it’s certainly catching up. And frankly, in terms of non-awards season/non-Christmas releases of this nature, I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this since My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

That Nia Vardalos-led comedy is an apples-and-oranges comparison for almost any modern release save for maybe the first Star Wars. It opened in 108 theaters in April of 2002 and slowly earned buzz and bucks throughout the summer. It expanded to 530 theaters in weekend 14, finally topped 1,000 theaters in weekend 18 and was knocking out over/under $10 million weekends and often ranking #2 at the domestic box office through August and September before ending with $243 million domestic. Again, the Michelle Yeoh/Ke Huy Quan/Stephanie Hsu action-comedy isn’t going to perform like that, but that I’m quickly running out of any other comparisons is itself noteworthy.

I don’t think it’s going to spend the entire summer grossing over/under $3 million a week, right? However, it’s not like summer is packed with a deluge of wide releases. The film has defied realistic and plausible expectations from the moment it went semi-wide and didn’t collapse in weekend three. Even with rave reviews, white-hot buzz and its existence as a demographically-specific event movie, this kind of thing just isn’t supposed to happen in our modern theatrical landscape. It’s like Titanic, The Sixth Sense, The Greatest Showman and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, an exception to the rule, a glitch in the matrix and a provider of false hope.

Even with a normal rate of descent, it’ll end its domestic run with around $58 million. However, it should get a modest bump from Memorial Day weekend before facing an early June weekend with zero major wide releases (all due respect to Watcher and Crimes of the Future). Save for May 27 (Top Gun: Maverick and Bob’s Burgers: The Movie), June 24 (Elvis and The Black Phone), July 15 (Where the Crawdads Sing and Paws of Fury) and August 5 (Bullet Train and Easter Sunday), there isn’t a week with more than one “big” release all summer. Everything, Everywhere All at Once may remain hot all summer by default.