John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place Part II dominated the box office over the holiday weekend, to the tune of a pandemic-era record $58.3 million, but another post-apocalyptic action-horror movie unexpectedly popped up in the top 10 too.
World War Z, starring Brad Pitt as a former-United Nations field agent who’s tasked with stopping a zombie pandemic, made $448,000 this weekend on 80 screens. That was good enough to push Mortal Kombat out of the top 10, although it still finished behind Godzilla vs. Kong ($1.06 million) and Dream Horse ($639,636), which has a 30 Rock-esque poster. Still, not bad for a movie that came out eight years ago.
And it made for a solid — if depressing — double feature with A Quiet Place Part II:
Attendance-wise, the figures for World War Z are not as easy to analyze since the movie was part of a double-feature with A Quiet Place Part II at eighty drive-in locations across the country. If we broke it down based on the average ticket price, that’d be about 38,000 people over three days (and 49,000 over four days), but we can’t assume that sort of breakdown with a double-feature price point, which typically offers two movies for the price of one and can vary tremendously among those eighty drive-ins.
It appears A Quiet Place Part II played before World War Z, in case people weren’t in the mood for a pandemic movie. I can’t imagine why.