Good thing “Novocaine” can’t feel pain, because this one hurts. Paramount’s “Novocaine” hit No. 1 at the domestic box office this weekend despite grossing just $8.7 million. That’s the lowest total for a movie to top the box office this year in a given weekend, and it led a dismally weak weekend on the whole at the domestic box office, in which the Top 10 earned just a cumulative $45.2 million, the worst of 2025 thus far.
It will come as a surprise to no one that the box office has been bleak since the pandemic, but you don’t even have to go back that far to find a weekend that had a worse No. 1. For that we look to February 9-11 2024 when the No. 1 movie in America was Universal’s “Argylle” in its second weekend in theaters, earning just $6.2 million. The biggest new release that weekend was Focus Features’ “Lisa Frankenstein,” which bombed to $3.6 million and yet was No. 2 for the weekend.
“Novocaine,” however, was a new release, whereas “Argylle” was in its second weekend, and the same goes for the $6.9 million that the “Mean Girls” musical made in its second weekend also in 2024. Among new releases, February 10-12 2023, had “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” open to only $8.3 million, beating out “Avatar: The Way of Water” in its ninth weekend in theaters. “The Invitation” in August 26-28 2022 was just a $6.8 million opening for No. 1. According to Comscore, since the start of 2021, six films have opened below “Novocaine’s” $8.7 million and hit No. 1, those being “Raya and the Last Dragon,” “Wrath of Man,” “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” “The New Mutants,” “Nobody,” and “The Invitation.”
But “The Invitation” arrived in the last weekend of August when a lot of movies are dumped in a traditionally slow weekend at the box office, and February can be forgiven for the same reason. “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” opened during Super Bowl weekend and ended up adding over 1,500 screens in Week 2, mitigating its second weekend drop.
“Novocaine” — and everything else that opened behind it — has less of an excuse. It was a wide release with 3,365 screens and opened in the middle of March when kids are starting to go on Spring Break and when more tentpoles are generally arriving. If you want to be optimistic, you can say that four of the Top 6 were original films, not sequels or based on an existing franchise. That includes “Mickey 17,” which had a steep 60 percent drop in Week 2 ($7.51 million), Steven Soderbergh’s “Black Bag” ($7.5 million), and “The Last Supper” ($2.8 million). A24’s horror film “Opus” didn’t crack the Top 10 with just over $1 million grossed, and though it’s hardly an original film, “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Toons Movie” is the first fully-animated Looney Tunes movie to hit theaters. It made $3.17 million. Not too shabby for a movie that Warner Bros. canceled and sold.
The good news for “Novocaine” is that it will almost certainly still make a profit. The film was produced for just $18 million, pretty rare for a studio film, and got a B Cinemascore, so word of mouth should help this movie heading into Week 2.
But if audiences aren’t showing up for a slate as diverse as this one, what will bring them to movie theaters? The way “Captain America: Brave New World” is shaping up, it’s on pace to finish below the $476 million grossed by “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” Adult audiences haven’t given the time of day to a Soderbergh spy movie with Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, a new Bong Joon Ho sci-fi head-trip, or a Marvel tentpole.
Next weekend is Disney’s “Snow White,” which has been hounded by people angry at it on both sides of the political spectrum. The next major IP project after that is WB’s “The Minecraft Movie” opening April 4. If those don’t hit, then unlike “Novocaine,” everyone will be feeling the pain.
