The animated film Raya and the Last Dragon easily topped the box office this weekend, the first one that also included some theaters in New York City. (One of those theaters even had a special greeter, Liam Neeson.)
While the $8.6 million gross, according to The Hollywood Reporter, isn’t anything to sneeze at in these unusual pandemic times, it is worth noting that last week an animated film with far worse reviews (and no New York City theaters), Tom & Jerry, opened to $14.1 million.
The key difference, the trade outlet suggests, is that some theater chains, including Cinemark, rejected the new film. Both titles had a simultaneous release on a streaming platform, with Tom & Jerry on HBO Max and Raya on Disney+, but the Warner Bros./HBO Max deal has been described as having a “more generous” split. The implication here is that film exhibition is still in its growing pains stages as it adjusts to the new landscape of day-and-date releases with the major studios and streamers. (Of note: Disney+ subscribers still need to pay an additional $30 on top of the monthly fee to gain unlimited access to the title. The last “premier access” title, Mulan, became available as part of the wider D+ library three months later.)
“From a sheer box office optics point of view, one can argue that Disney left money on the table,” wrote Deadline‘s box office editor Anthony D’Alessandro. He also expressed concern that “Black Widow may emulate the same distribution path as Raya on May 7.”
Raya and the Last Dragon‘s global take was $26.2 million, with $8.4 million (nearly the same as the domestic number) coming from China. V.F. critic Richard Lawson called the new film, which features the voices of Kelly Marie Tran and Awkwafina, “a fun movie, packed with escapades and just-shy-of-cloying cutesy humor, but there is a resonant depth, too.”
In other box office news, the Tom Holland–Daisy Ridley science fiction flick Chaos Walking performed poorly by any metric, with $3.8 million.
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