Box Office: ‘Uncharted’ Ends Video Game Movie Curse With $106M Worldwide Weekend

Over the President's Day weekend, Sony's "Uncharted" earned a rousing $44 million over its Fri-Mon frame and a likely $51 million over its Fri-Mon debut. That is the biggest domestic debut of the year, easily beating Scream's $33 million weekend launch. Sonic the Hedgehog is the only video game that is ahead of inflation, with $48 million over the Fri-Sun portion of a $70 million President's Day launch in 2020. It is Sony's fourth straight release of a Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City release. Spider-Man: No Way Home, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and Venom are all in the same league. What went wrong for a film that was in development hell for over a decade and had all the hallmarks of a desperate intellectual property rights company?

The movie was not a faithful adaptation of your favorite video game, but an old-school adventure movie with old-school treasure hunts and action scenes. There was a lot of Nathan Drake wearing the video game costume doing Drake-type activities in the sequel. It had a hot young star (Tom Holland, fresh off Spider-Man: No Way Home) with a previous generation's butt-in-seats draw and the baddie. This doesn't mean that Tom Holland is now a movie star, as this could just be his Snow White and the Huntsman, which opened with $55 million in the middle ofKristen Stewart's tenure, but it won't.

The video game movie curse is no longer a thing. The Angry Birds Movie became the second film to top $100 million domestically as it raced past $350 million worldwide. We had MGM and Warner Bros., halfway decent Tomb Raider reboot, WB and New Line, which is frankly spectacular. Detective Pikachu was a well-liked film and earned over a hundred million dollars domestically and over a hundred million dollars worldwide. It didn't earn more because it was kneecapped by the movies. Sonic the Hedgehog was the last pre-covid movie to make over $300 million and was on a $82 million budget. The New Line film earned $85 million global and top-tier HBO Max viewers.

There were stumbles in the year of 2016 with the likes of Warcraft and Assassin's Creed. Tomb Raider Trapped was the second movie in the Angry Birds movie series and it bombed because the first movie stank. It doesn't mean anyone cared about Monster Hunter in late 2020. We are at a point where a big-deal video game adaptation has at least a 50% chance of breaking out, provided A) the intellectual property is of value and B) the movie offers entertainment value and appeal for those with no interest in the source material. I'm overly optimistic for the film, which has a marquee director (Eli Roth) and a stacked cast.

It's looking at a domestic finish of between $85-90 million, if it flatlines like Fifty Shades of Grey, and between $115-125 million, if it's like Daredevil, Ghost Rider, or Deadpool. Kingsman: The Secret Service and Black Panther had leggy runs on President's Day and would give a terrific finish to the movie. A B+ from Cinemascore is useless in terms of judging audience response, but it isn't like the lousy reviews stopped people from showing up. Will it be a 13-day champion before it gets stomped on by The Batman? Will it go alongside the Caped Crusader since there is almost nothing else opening between The Batman and Morbius on April 1? Will Tomb Raider be trapped because this one wasn't great?

The movie earned another $55 million overseas over the weekend. It will be at $139 million by tomorrow. With a 36/64 split which is likely to go up on the overseas side, studios kept trying to make video game movies before the year 2016 Need for Speed is the highest grossing domestic film of all time with a domestic gross of 203 million and a worldwide gross of $60 million. The Resident Evil franchise is the only successful video game-based theatrical franchise, but hope springs eternal because few of these films qualified as made money from theatrical hits. It's good news for Sonic the Hedgehog 2.