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Wonka Tops Box Office on New Year’s Eve with High Domestic Sales

Fantasy musical film Wonka has become a blockbuster hit of the holiday season, claiming top spot at the box office to conclude 2023.By: Dylan Low

Starring Timothée Chalamet as a younger Willy Wonka, the trending film has garnered $22.7 million over the weekend and is projected to earn $29.5 million across the four-day holiday. This increases the domestic gross to $140.2 million, a solid achievement for the $125 million production. Internationally, the Warner Bros. release has accumulated up to $400 million.

On the other hand, DC superhero adventure film Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom continued to perform poorly at the box office, The film grossed $18.3 million over the weekend and $23.5 million for the four-day period. This only brings the action-fantasy to a domestic haul to a less than substantial $81.8 million, despite guaranteeing a second-place finish. The film has done better internationally, as the film release achieved over $250 million. However the film, consisting of a messy production, cost more than $200 million to produce and tens of millions to market.

In third place, Migration, a joint production by Universal and Illumination, achieved $17 million across the weekend and a projected $22 million over the four-day holiday, which totals its domestic amount of $59.1 million. The animated adventure will not be on par with Illumination’s blockbuster films like Sing or Despicable Me, but it was of cheaper cost to produce with a budget of around $70 million. The expectation is that the film can continue its momentum into the post-holiday period with not many movies targeted towards kids.

Overall, the 2023 domestic box office earned over $9 billion, which marks improvement from their 2022 total ticket sales of $7.4 billion. Although, it still falls short of the $11.4 billion in revenue from 2019, the last pre-covid year.

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