‘Sonic 3’ Speeds to $70.5 Million Opening; ‘Mufasa’ Faces Box Office Peril With $35 Million Start

The pre-Christmas box office brings two newcomers with very different outlooks, as Paramount’s “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” is well on its way to being the most successful chapter of the video game film series while Disney’s “Mufasa” is left looking to overseas box office and the long legs of the holiday season for a rebound after a poor start.

“Sonic 3” is opening slightly below the $72.1 million domestic start that “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” earned in April 2022 with $70.5 million from 3,761 theaters after earning $25.7 million on opening day. It is also enjoying the strongest reception of the series from critics and hardcore Sonic fans alike with an A on CinemaScore and Rotten Tomatoes scores of 85% critics and 98% audience.

For “Sonic 2,” the opening weekend crowd was 46% between the ages of 18-35 and 32% under 17, suggesting that initial audiences for the film skewed a bit more towards gamers than towards the families that later showed up during the Easter holiday period. Early PostTrak polls suggest similar trends for “Sonic 3,” which got 34% of its opening day audience from families.

With kids out of school for the next two weeks and fans gushing about the big screen arrival of Shadow the Hedgehog, “Sonic 3” has a good chance to have a better second weekend drop than the 59% recorded by its predecessor and has everything it needs to be the first “Sonic” film to cross $200 million domestic and $500 million worldwide.

“Mufasa,” meanwhile, is falling well short of its lower projections of a $50 million opening, instead pacing towards a $35 million start despite a wider screen count of 4,100 screens, including Imax support. It’s a start on level with the unadjusted $36.9 million start of Disney’s “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” in October 2019.

With families expected to wait until Christmas Day to start turning out to theaters in significant numbers, a lack of general audience buzz compared to “Sonic 3,” and lukewarm reviews with a 57% Rotten Tomatoes score, “Mufasa” wasn’t expected to challenge for the No. 1 spot.

But a domestic opening below $40 million for a film with a reported $200 million production budget is a bad start any way you slice it.

There are still two ways for the Pride Lands prequel to salvage a decent final total. While overseas grosses are expected to get nowhere near the $1.1 billion of the “Lion King” remake, the big screen spectacle of the photorealistic CGI — which critics widely regarded as improved under the direction of Barry Jenkins — has the potential for wider global appeal than “Sonic 3,” which is based on a video game series whose popularity varies depending on region.

And on the domestic side, “Mufasa” will need to find its own traction with families regardless of the competition, including from Disney’s own “Moana 2,” which continues to leg out with $13 million in its fourth weekend.

While opening night audience reception isn’t as strong as “Sonic 3,” “Mufasa” did earn an 88% RT audience score and an A- on CinemaScore. That is the same grade that “Wonka” earned last year as it turned a very unexceptional $39 million opening into a $218 million domestic run, though it did so in a far less crowded end-of-year market.

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