‘Demon Slayer’ Unseats ‘Mortal Kombat’ for Top Spot at Weekend Box Office
Written by SOURCE on May 3, 2021
Mortal Kombat’s reign atop the U.S. box office didn’t last long.
The R-rated reboot was supplanted this weekend by the anime adventure movie Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, which earned $6.4 million, Variety reports. Mortal Kombat fell a whopping 70% from its previous showing, earning just $6.2 million. The final results were a reversal from last week, when Mortal Kombat finished ahead of Demon Slayer.
While neither of those figures are particularly impressive, given the state of theaters during the pandemic, Hollywood should be somewhat encouraged that enough moviegoers showed up to give a relatively unknown Japanese anime movie a box office win.
As the summer movie season gets underway, and people continue to get vaccinated, the hope is that box office numbers will continue to climb into the fall. We’ll have a much better sense of the moviegoing landscape in the coming months, when high profile titles like Black Widow, A Quiet Place Part II, and F9 all make their way into theaters.
As for Demon Slayer, its $34.1 million in the U.S. and Canada combined makes it the third-highest grossing anime title in North American history, passing Dragon Ball: Super Broly on that list.
And despite this week’s somewhat anemic numbers, Mortal Kombat still boasts a healthy $34 million domestic total, which is all the more impressive given the fact that it’s also available to stream on HBO Max.
Rounding out the top five were Godzilla vs. Kong in third, Separation in fourth, and Nobody in fifth.
