Sony's Bad Bays for Life is bigger than expected after a better-than-anticipated Saturday hold of $21.8M, -9% from the Friday/previews number of $23.3M, catapulting the Will Smith-Martin Lawrence movie to $61.2M 3-day and a $70.9M opening according to early Sunday industry figures, easily the second-best MLK opener ever after American Sniper ($107.2M), and it's the best opening ever for a Bad Boys movie. Sony is seeing less with a $59.1M 3-day and $68.1M 4-day, but heralding a $100M-plus worldwide start. Sony has had a lot of great IP that they've tried to reboot lately, some of it didn't work because there wasn't any reason to tell the story. But they worked hard on making this Will Smith-Martin Lawrence reteam excellent, providing great reasons why there was a need to tell a story. Just like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull dealt with old age, Bad Boys for Life leans into Mike and Marcus not being bad anymore, and the dilemmas of losing their street edge.
Universal is reporting a 3-day of $22.5M and 4-day of $30M in U.S/Canada and $57.3M worldwide (under what we were spotting earlier) for the disastrous Dolittle, which we picked through in the previous update in regards to what went wrong. We can't determine how much Dolittle will bleed yet as it opened in limited offshore territories, not the big ones like Maleficent: Mistress of Evil did, which was bailed out by foreign (read below). Forty-six foreign markets grossed $27.3M by EOD today, which is nothing to brag about on a film this size. Get this, the previous Eddie Murphy Fox Dr. Dolittle movies opened better over 3-days (without accounting for inflation) with the 1998 version doing $29M over 3-days and the 2001 sequel opening to $25M. If the Robert Downey Jr. Dolittle wasn't so expensive, we'd be celebrating what a solid stateside opening this is for a family film, especially in January.
