Sat | Dec 28, 2024

The Reynolds-Lively household win at the box office

Published:Monday | August 12, 2024 | 12:08 AM
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Blake Lively, left, and Ryan Reynolds attend the world premiere of Marvel Studios’ ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ at the David H. Koch Theatre on July 22 in New York.
AP
Blake Lively, left, and Ryan Reynolds attend the world premiere of Marvel Studios’ ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ at the David H. Koch Theatre on July 22 in New York.
This image released by Sony Pictures shows Justin Baldoni, right, and Blake Lively in a scene from ‘It Ends With Us’.
AP
This image released by Sony Pictures shows Justin Baldoni, right, and Blake Lively in a scene from ‘It Ends With Us’.
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NEW YORK (AP):

In the Ryan Reynolds-Blake Lively box-office showdown, both husband and wife came out winners.

Reynolds’ Marvel Studios smash Deadpool & Wolverine remained the top movie in North American theatres for the third straight week with $54.2 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates on Sunday. Worldwide, it’s now surpassed $1 billion. Deadpool & Wolverine, though, was closely followed by It Ends With Us, the romance drama starring Lively, which surpassed expectations with a stellar $50-million début.

Together, the films created a kind of family edition of Barbenheimer, in which a pair of very different movies thrived in part due to counterprogramming. Only this time, the opposite movies were fronted by one of Hollywood’s most famous couples. The films’ one-two punch wasn’t entirely unprecedented. In 1990, Bruce Willis’ Die Hard 2 led the box office, while Demi Moore’s Ghost came in second.

The weekend also featured a high-priced flop. Borderlands, the long-delayed $120-million videogame adaptation directed by Eli Roth, launched with a paltry $8.8 million for Lionsgate. The film, starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart and Jack Black, was shot all the way back in 2021. After delays and reshoots, it finally landed in theatres effectively dead on arrival; it scored just 10 per cent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and seems likely contend for one of the worst movies of the year.

Meanwhile, Deadpool & Wolverine, which co-stars Hugh Jackman, continued its march through box-office records. In three weeks, it’s already one of the most lucrative Marvel releases and trails only Disney’s other 2024 smash, Inside Out ($1.6 billion worldwide), among movies released this year.

Lively makes a cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine, but she both stars in and produced It Ends With Us. Adapted from the bestselling romance novel by Colleen Hoover, Lively stars as Lily Bloom, a Boston florist torn between two men, one from her present life (Justin Baldoni, who also directed the film) and another who was her first love (Brandon Sklenar).

It Ends With Us cost a modest $25 million to produce, so it will turn a significant profit for co-financiers Columbia Pictures and Wayfarer Studios.