‘Moana 2’ Tops Box Office Again as ‘Kraven the Hunter’ Crashes to $12 Million Opening

With one more week until the Christmas box office really picks up business, Disney’s “Moana 2” is still atop the box office charts while a pair of new releases — Sony/Columbia’s “Kraven the Hunter” and Warner Bros.’ “Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim” — are failing to launch.

“Kraven the Hunter” is opening to an estimated $11-12 million from 3,689 theaters this weekend, below the $15.3 million opening of “Madame Web,” another flop Marvel adaptation released by Sony earlier this year. Comic book movie fans have not been impressed, giving it a C on CinemaScore.

While Sony found success with the “Venom” trilogy, including this past fall’s “The Last Dance,” which legged out to $473 million worldwide, that has not extended to other attempts to create spinoffs based on “Spider-Man” characters like Morbius and Kraven. “Kraven” has a reported budget of $110 million, an increase from an initial $90 million budget due to a year-long delay after the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike.

For now, Sony’s is going back to the webslinger himself with the animated film “Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse” and a fourth Marvel Studios-produced Spider-Man film starring Tom Holland, who earlier this week signed a production deal with Sony.

“Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim” just cracked the top 5 with an industry estimated $5.4 million opening from 2,602 theaters. The anime film from director Kenji Kamiyama and based on a section of J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices from “Lord of the Rings” was greenlit in 2022 to renew Warner Bros.’ rights to Middle-Earth adaptations.

Reception for the film was mixed from critics, earning a 52% score on Rotten Tomatoes and a B from audiences on CinemaScore, the latter being below the A/A- range that Peter Jackson’s “LOTR” and “Hobbit” films received.

Among the November holdovers, “Moana 2” takes No. 1 again with $26 million in its third weekend, bringing its domestic total to an estimated $337 million. Globally, the film will pass the lifetime gross of the first “Moana,” which made $643 million in 2016 and in a subsequent 2019 re-release.

Universal’s “Wicked” is in second this weekend with $22.3 million, bringing its domestic total to $358 million. Paramount’s “Gladiator II” is in fourth behind “Kraven” with $7.7 million in its fourth weekend for a $145 million domestic total.

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