Home Entertainment Local weekend box office – Onward opens top as Gretel and Hansel bombs

Local weekend box office – Onward opens top as Gretel and Hansel bombs

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Blame it on Covid-19 or just plain human error, but for some strange reason, our South African box office sources are reporting different things for this weekend past. Based on our own informed guesstimates, the rankings provided by one source appears to be correct, but unfortunately they come with no box office numbers. We’ve scrounged up what we can though.

South Africans love animated family films. This is a fact held up by years of box office data. Even widely regarded terrible animated films often do good business locally so it came as no surprise that Pixar’s latest, Onward, is the new top film in SA. The animated feature debuted at no.1 with R1.8 million, which is admittedly not a big opening – especially for a film of this ilk – but it was enough.

Bad Boys for Life managed to stay firm second place, which meant that last weekend’s box office champ, Sonic the Hedgehog, dropped two spots to third place. In fourth, we got our second newcomer of the weekend as Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen opened with just over R800 000. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but the British gangster film only opened in 58 venues which meant that it actually has one of the highest per-theatre averages on the charts.

As The Invisible Man rounded out the upper half of the charts, we have to hop all the way down to ninth place for the next newcomer, The Photograph. It had a very limited opening of just 28 cinemas, so this isn’t surprising, but even so it did rather poorly. At least it did better than Gretel and Hansel though. The trippy new horror movie only debuted in 13 cinemas and barely cracked the R100 000 mark as it landed way outside the top 10. Horror movies released locally appear to be stuck in the old chicken or the egg conundrum as those that aren’t a part of huge franchises have traditionally not done great business in SA, but it could be argued that they rarely get given the platform to find an audience thanks to extremely limited release. Which, of course, is only done because they don’t do big business. What a yolk!

Here’s the full South African box office ranking, but minus any figures. Apologies. Hopefully, next week will be back to normal.

No.Movie Name Last Week's Position
1Onward NE
2Bad Boys for Life 2nd
3Sonic the Hedgehog 1st
4The Gentlemen NE
5The Invisible Man 3rd
6The Call of the Wild 5th
7Jumanji: The Next Level 4th
8Little Women 6th
9The Photograph NE
10Vergeet My Nie 9th

NE = New Entry

Last Updated: March 11, 2020

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