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The Box Office Report

Get in, loser, 'Mean Girls' wins the weekend

The musical remake burns rivals like ‘The Beekeeper’ and ‘Wonka.’

Bill Kuchman

Bill Kuchman

— 3 min read
Get in, loser, 'Mean Girls' wins the weekend
Jaquel Spivey, Angourie Rice and Auli’i Cravalho in Mean Girls. / Paramount Pictures

Hello! Welcome to The Box Office Report for the weekend of Jan. 12-15, 2024.

Popculturology has made the jump from Substack to a new hosting platform. You might notice a few design changes, but the newsletter itself remains the same.

1. Mean Girls

Weekend gross: $28M
Total domestic gross: $28M
Last weekend: New release
Percent drop: NA

The original Mean Girls hit theaters two decades ago. Since then, the movie was turned into a Broadway musical … and then that musical was turned into a movie.

The new Mean Girls debuted with $28 million in North America, good enough to top the $24.4 million that Lindsay Lohan’s Mean Girls opened with in 2004.

The original Mean Girls went on to gross $86 million domestically and $130.7 million worldwide. Does this new version starring Angourie Rice and Reneé Rapp have the legs to top the box office haul of its predecessor? (And if it does, will we someday get a movie based on the musical based on the movie?)

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2. The Beekeeper

Weekend gross: $16.8M
Total domestic gross: $16.8M
Last weekend: New release
Percent drop: NA

I’m proposing a franchise of action films starring Jason Statham where he plays a dude with a different job in each film who then has to get pulled back into a life of kicking ass.

Box office-wise, The Beekeeper trails behind recent Statham opening weekends. Putting the Fast and Furious films aside, The Beekeeper’s $16.8 million weekend doesn’t live up to the likes of The Meg ($45.4 million), The Expendables ($34.8 million) or Spy! ($29.1 million).

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