Super Mario and Project Hail Mary outrun Lee Cronin’s The Mummy at box office

The weekend box office made its hierarchy plain: broad, four-quadrant brands kept winning while a high-profile horror reboot struggled to break through on opening weekend. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie stayed No. 1 for a third straight frame with $35 million, Project Hail Mary held No. 2 with $20.5 million, and Lee Cronin’s The Mummy had to settle for third with $13.5 million.

That ordering says as much about audience behavior as it does about movie marketing. The Mario title pushed its worldwide total to $747.5 million, while Project Hail Mary climbed to $573.1 million worldwide after its fifth weekend. By contrast, The Mummy arrived with wide release muscle, including IMAX screens and 3,304 North American theaters, but could not convert that footprint into a breakout start.

The film opened in North America on April 17 and internationally on April 15, backed by Warner Bros. Pictures and produced through New Line Cinema, Atomic Monster, Blumhouse and A Wicked/Good Production. Variety reported the movie took in $5.2 million on opening day and was tracking toward about $12 million by Sunday before The Numbers later posted a three-day domestic total of $13,515,000. That is a respectable start for many horror films, but not enough to threaten the entrenched draw of bigger brands already dominating the multiplex.

Cronin’s film is a 133-minute body-horror reimagining of Karl Freund’s 1932 classic The Mummy, and it arrives as the director’s follow-up to Evil Dead Rise. Top-billed cast members include Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, Veronica Falcón, May Calamawy and Natalie Grace. Even so, AP critic Mark Kennedy said the movie tries to revive the monster with a twist but falls flat, a sign that conceptual ambition alone was not enough to overcome a crowded marketplace and stronger audience loyalty elsewhere.

The broader market reflected that squeeze. Domestic box office for the weekend was estimated at $90.6 million, down 34% from the comparable weekend a year earlier, even as year-to-date domestic revenue had already surpassed the $2 billion mark. In that landscape, The Mummy did not collapse, but it also did not break out. The result reinforced a familiar lesson for studios: recognizable family franchises and established crowd-pleasers can still outrun fresh spins on classic material, even when the new release opens wide and arrives with major studio backing.