‘Den of Thieves 2’ Kicks Off Lionsgate’s Campaign for a Box Office Turnaround
With the holidays over, the box office is expected to see a significant slowdown until the release of “Captain America: Brave New World” in February. But there is some intrigue this weekend with the release of “Den of Thieves: Pantera,” which is the start of Lionsgate’s campaign to turn around their woeful box office fortunes.
From 15 films released last year, Lionsgate grossed a mere $244.7 million at the North American box office, according to data from The Numbers. To put that into perspective, 2024’s highest grossing film, Disney/Pixar’s “Inside Out 2,” made more in its first week in U.S./Canada theaters than the theatrical runs of all of Lionsgate’s 2024 films combined.
The studio was able to end the year on a positive note with Kingdom Story Company’s low-budget family film “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” which grossed a decent $40 million. But that wasn’t enough to outweigh flops like “The Crow,” “The Killer’s Game,” and most prominently, “Borderlands,” which was a $110 million co-production and grossed a measly $32.9 million worldwide.
“On ‘Borderlands,’ nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong: it sat on the shelf for too long during the pandemic, and reshoots and rising interest rates took it outside the safety zone of our usual strict financial models,” CEO Jon Feltheimer said frankly in an earnings call last November.
Thankfully for Lionsgate, 2025 comes with multiple films with name-brand recognition that should have far better box office potential. The wild card of the bunch is “Ballerina,” a “John Wick” spinoff starring Ana de Armas that will likely prominently feature Keanu Reeves’ cameo as John Wick in its marketing. September will see the return of Jigsaw in “Saw XI,” a sequel to the 2023 “Saw X,” which revitalized the seemingly stale 2000s horror series with the most critically praised installment yet.
But Lionsgate may release the highest grossing film in its history in October with “Michael,” Antoine Fuqua’s highly anticipated Michael Jackson biopic with the late pop star played by his nephew, Jaafar Jackson. Lionsgate will handle domestic distribution on the film with Universal handling overseas, and the film is likely to draw significant interest not only with Jackson’s immense fanbase, but also from general moviegoers who may be curious about how the film handles Jackson’s personal scandals and abuse allegations.
Any one of those films would make 2025 a far better year for Lionsgate than 2024. Combined, they may give Lionsgate a chance to not only improve from last year but also top the $579 million grossed in 2023 from films like “Saw X” and “John Wick: Chapter 4.”
But it begins with “Den of Thieves: Pantera,” the sequel to the 2018 STX action film starring Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. That film opened to $15 million from a similar mid-January release slot, and “Den of Thieves: Pantera” is projected to open slightly below that at $11-13 million.
If it can perform slightly above that and match the $15 million of its predecessor, it may have a chance to take the No. 1 spot from Disney’s “Mufasa,” which made $23 million last weekend. “Den of Thieves 2” was produced by eOne, which Lionsgate acquired at the end of 2023, on a $40 million budget, so it will take Lionsgate’s usual formula of foreign presales and a thrifty digital marketing spend to make it theatrically profitable as it tries to leg out to the $44.9 million domestic run of the first “Den of Thieves.”
Also opening after a limited run is Paramount’s “Better Man,” a biopic about British music star Robbie Williams in which he plays himself as a computer-generated ape. Directed by “The Greatest Showman” filmmaker Michael Gracey, “Better Man has received widespread praise from surprised critics with an 89% Rotten Tomatoes score, but has only grossed a mere $91,700 from six theaters as it has struggled to gain interest from American moviegoers who are largely unfamiliar with Williams and his music.
Because of this, Paramount has significantly drawn down the film’s nationwide expansion to approximately 1,200 theaters and is projected to open to less than $5 million.
It is very possible that the weekend grosses for all films will be substantially impacted this week, as several major Los Angeles theaters such as the AMC Glendale and Regal Sherman Oaks are currently closed due to the wildfires that have killed at least five people and destroyed at least 2,000 structures, making it the costliest fire in LA County history. Meanwhile, the east coast is expected to be hit by winter storms that are currently making their way across the central U.S., possibly impacting moviegoing in major cities in the region.
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