Whoa, What's With Brightburn's Huge Second Weekend Drop?

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Whoa, What's With Brightburn's Huge Second Weekend Drop?

What happened to Brightburn? Not only did it get lost in the shuffle of Memorial Day weekend, it just fell more than almost any other movie in its second weekend.

Brightburn ended its three-day opening weekend with $7.8 million, which placed it fifth on last week's box office chart, almost a million dollars above Booksmart. Fast-forward to Week 2, and the situation is reversed. Booksmart got a boost of 13 theaters, which isn't much, but it put it at 2,518 theaters and gave it an estimated $3,328,648 for this weekend.

Brightburn, on the other hand, didn't gain or lose any theaters, it still has more than Booksmart at 2,607. But it only made an estimated $2,315,000, which is a drop of -70.5%.

That's big.

There are other films lower on the chart with slightly bigger box office drops, per Box Office Mojo, but those films also lost hundreds or even a thousand screens from last week to now. That's not the case for Brightburn. That drop put Brightburn's per-screen average at just $888, which is pretty low.

Compare that to the $11,934 per-screen average for this weekend's box office leader, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, or even the $1,322 per-screen average of Booksmart. A Dog's Journey has a lower per-screen average at $621, but it also just lost 1,605 screens after being out for three weeks.

Brightburn is a smaller movie, made for a reported production budget around $6 million. In addition to the $14.2 million it has made at the domestic box office so far -- from across this past week, including Memorial Day Monday -- it has also made $10.5 million so far at the foreign box office. The total as of today is $24,712,552.

So Brightburn isn't likely to lose any money, it's just not a good sign for any potential sequels that fans seem to have lost interest so quickly.

Brightburn got middle-of-the-road reviews from critics and a mostly positive RT Audience Score of 68% so far, but that's from only 3,091 users. It actually got a pretty lame C+ CinemaScore from moviegoers polled on opening night. Usually those scores tend to be high, but when people are disappointed, they can grade low.

Brightburn got a lot of attention because of Guardians of the Galaxy writer/director James Gunn, who is a producer of the film, which was written by his brother Brian Gunn and cousin Mark Gunn. David Yarovesky directed the movie. It also captured fans' imaginations that Brightburn took the Superman origin story and gave it a dark twist. Otherwise, Brightburn is just an indie horror film that found a small following but maybe not enough to continue this universe. We'll see.

Did you see Brightburn? If so, how would you grade it?