Mufasa leads a meh first box office of the year

With no big new releases, we’ve been seeing the same movies for weeks now.

By Emma Keates  |  January 6, 2025 | 9:18am
Photo: Disney
Film News Box office
Mufasa leads a meh first box office of the year

Wicked may have won the Golden Globe for Cinematic & Box Office Achievement (a.k.a. for making boatloads of money) last night, but it couldn’t quite levitate the box office to pre-pandemic levels. Overall, the first weekend of 2025 brought in a total of $105.5 million (per Deadline), a noted dropoff even from 2020, when Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker led to a grand total of $142.4 million. The movies were more popular than last year’s first weekend—a 23.3% jump from $85.9 million to be exact—but that may have as much to do with inflated ticket prices as it did increased attendance. 

Since there were no major new releases this past weekend (and a bleak January dumping ground to look forward to in general), the list is pretty much the same as we’ve been seeing for a few weeks. Mufasa: The Lion King regained the lead over Sonic The Hedgehog 3 with $23.8 million to Sonic’s $21.2 million. Those two were followed by Nosferatu, officially Robert Eggers’ highest-grossing film with $64.9 million overall ($13.2 million this weekend), and Moana 2, which added another $12.4 million to its already massive pot. Golden Globe winner Wicked rounded out the top five with $10.2 million. “It shows us how important making this stuff is—in a time when pessimism and cynicism sort of rule the planet right now—that we can still make art that is a radical act of optimism,” director Jon M. Chu said in his acceptance speech last night, per Deadline. For the studio, at the very least, the outlook is definitely sunny.

The full top 10, courtesy of Box Office Mojo, is as follows:

  1. Mufasa: The Lion King, $23,836,000
  2. Sonic the Hedgehog 3, $21,200,124
  3. Nosferatu, $13,200,000
  4. Moana 2, $12,397,000
  5. Wicked, $10,200,055
  6. A Complete Unknown, $8,067,000
  7. Babygirl, $4,492,499
  8. Gladiator II, $2,675,000
  9. Homestead, $2,103,576
  10. The Fire Inside, $1,230,901

 
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