"Doctor Strange 2", directed by Sam Raimi and released by the Walt Disney Company, benefited from becoming the first Marvel film to follow "Spider-Man: No Way Home", in which Benedict Cumberbatch's sorcerer played a major part.
It also builds on the famous Disney+ series "Wandavision" and includes a lot of cameos that fans didn't want to be revealed ahead of time.
The Bad Guys" and "Sonic the Hedgehog 2", both sequels to previous family films, came in third and fourth place, respectively. In its sixth week, Universal's "The Bad Guys" earned $6.1 million. The seventh instalment of "Sonic 2" grossed $3.9 million.
The folk horror thriller "Men", directed by Alex Garland, grossed $3.3 million for production firm and distributor A24.
While Tom Cruise and "Top Gun" wait in the wings, Benedict Cumberbatch's Doctor Strange and his multiverse get to stay a bit longer at the top of the weekend box office. According to studio estimates provided on May 29, Marvel's "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" was the top-grossing film of the weekend for the third time, grossing $31.6 million in 4,534 North American cinemas.
"Downton Abbey: A New Era" had a great opening weekend for Focus Features, grossing $16 million from 3,820 theatres, but Benedict Cumberbatch's Doctor Strange has faced no significant opposition.
"This film has had a pretty wide open marketplace", said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “This weekend really is, this is the proverbial calm before the storm."
The storm will arrive in the form of "Top Gun: Maverick", the long-awaited and long-delayed sequel, which will be released next week on Memorial Day weekend, 36 years after the original smash success and cultural milestone.
“The marketing for this movie has really been going on for about three years." Dergarabedian said. "That’s a pretty long runway to guild up excitement."
On May 25, Tom Cruise made a whirlwind appearance for the film's European premiere at Cannes, France, which included a flyover by French fighter planes and an honorary Palme d'Or award.
“Top Gun" represents two seemingly fading phenomena — the major movie star and the big-screen-only experience, for which Cruise has been a tireless ambassador. And the industry is hoping they will help bring a more familiar summer for theatres.
“This is going to be one of the most important Memorial Day weekends ever, considering what the stakes are", Dergarabedian said. “We didn’t have a traditional summer movie season for two years."
Before the pandemic, the summer box office season generally brought in more than $4 billion annually. After an essentially non-existent 2020, the 2021 take, in a year of recovery, was $1.75 billion. This year's crop of films, which also includes “Jurassic World Dominion" and “Thor: Love and Thunder", could double that, Dergarabedian said.
Meanwhile, “Everything Everywhere All At Once" is still going strong even after nine weeks in release. The A24 film picked up an additional $3.3 million, down only 6% from the previous weekend, bringing its total grosses to $47 million.
(With agency inputs)
