Novocaine Tops Box Office, But The Painful Truth About Ticket Sales Revealed!

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March 2025 was never going to be huge at the domestic box office. While this time last year saw the movie release calendar populated with titles including Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, Mike Mitchell’s Kung Fu Panda 4, Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and Gil Kenan’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, the industry is leaning mostly on original titles 12 months later. Still, things really aren’t going well.

Dan Berk and Robert Olsen’s action comedy “Novocaine,” starring Jack Quaid, has achieved a notable milestone by being crowned as the “#1 Movie In The United States and Canada.” However, if you examine the Top 10 films currently playing in theaters, it appears that business is relatively quiet. To better understand this trend, take a look at the numbers presented in the chart below, then let’s delve into analysis together.

Novocaine Wins The Weekend At The Box Office With A Seven-Figure Take

It’s never a good weekend at the box office when the #1 film makes less than $10 million, and that is what the industry is staring down when looking at the theatrical earnings over the last three days (via The Numbers). Novocaine made just $8.7 million since it arrived in theaters on Friday, and that was enough for it to claim the top spot on the domestic chart.

The debut of the film is just the eleventh best of the new year and is actually less than the $9.3 million that Drew Hancock’s Companion earned when it it arrived in theaters in late January (the irony being that the sci-fi horror film also starring Jack Quaid had to settle for second place behind the arrival of Peter Hastings’ Dog Man). It earned more than what Josh Ruben’s Heart Eyes made when it its first Friday to Sunday – $8.3 million – but the romance slasher’s box office story is that it saw ticket sales rise 19 percent in its second weekend due to a Valentine’s Day bump, but Novocaine isn’t likely to chart a similar path.

The low ticket sales are certainly a bigger problem for the industry at large instead of the action comedy, as the new release is actually in a pretty good position now to earn a profit before the end of its theatrical release. They key? a modest budget. According to Variety, Novocaine was made for just $18 million, and along with ticket sales from overseas, it has already made $10.5 million worldwide.

The movie also has some nice buzz going for it. While I personally didn’t love it as much as I wanted to – an opinion I express in my three-star review for TopMob – it has gotten a positive reception overall. Audiences appear to be enjoying themselves, as indicated by the “B” grade that was returned from CinemaScore surveys, so it has a good chance of hanging around in the back half of the Top 10 thanks to word of mouth and turning a profit.

Next weekend will be a sink-or-swim moment for the release. Marc Webb’s remake of the Disney classic Snow White is fully expected to take over as the new number one movie domestically, but if Novocaine can avoid having a deadly 60 percent drop, it may end up making a nice amount of money relative to its size.

Mickey 17 Moves To Second Place With A Tough Weekend-To-Weekend Drop

The box office position that Novocaine wants to avoid is what’s going on with Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 starring Robert Pattinson. Following the Best Picture win for Parasite, the writer/director seized an opportunity to make a big sci-fi blockbuster, and while the film is a wonderful addition to the filmmaker’s oeuvre that I think will ultimately have a strong legacy, it is not putting up awesome numbers at the box office.

With limited competition arriving in theaters simultaneously, Mickey 17 made $19 million in its opening weekend – which notably looked pretty rough on paper given that the production budget, according to Variety, was $118 million. Seven days later, the picture hasn’t gotten rosier. The film landed in second place during its second Friday-to-Sunday stretch, and the $7.5 million it earned represents a 60 percent drop.

Thus far, Mickey 17 is doing as well domestically as it is doing abroad, with the $33.3 million it has made in the United States and Canada matched by $34 million earned in other regions. To save you doing the math yourself, that means that the movie has made $67.3 million thus far during its run on the big screen.

As This Weekend’s Other New Releases, Black Bag And The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie Have To Settle For Filling Out The Bottom Of The Top 5

The box office numbers for Novocaine and Mickey 17 aren’t super healthy… and that’s unfortunate context for Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag and Peter Browngardt’s The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. The spy thriller and the animated adventure both played in wide release for the first time in the last three days, and they respectively placed third and fifth in the Top 10.

Final numbers may actually end up pushing Black Bag into the silver medal position given that early reporting only has a $10,000 difference between it and Mickey 17, but either way, it’s not the hot start that the film could have used. The flashy feature starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett cost $50 million to make – considerably more than Novocaine. Including other markets, the movie has made $11.8 million worldwide.

Made by Warner Bros. Animation but released by Ketchup Entertainment, The Day The Earth Blew Up has had a long, strange road to release… but at least it got theatrical distribution, which is more than can be said for the ill-fated Coyote vs. Acme. The first original, entirely animated Looney Tunes film made just $3.2 million playing in over 2,800 locations.

Looking ahead to next weekend, the aforementioned Snow White should make a much-needed splash, but audiences will also be able to see Robert De Niro pull double duty playing two roles in director Barry Levinson’s crime epic The Alto Knights. Be sure to head back here to TopMob next Sunday to see how everything shakes out at the box office, and to plan all of your upcoming cinematic adventures, consult our 2025 Movie Release Calendar.

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2025-03-16 22:40