‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Just Passed Hit Comedy ‘Morbius’ at the Domestic Box Office
The movie with the most jokes-per-minute of any Best Picture winner in the last 20 Oscar nights has, at last, sold more tickets than the movie that is basically one big joke.
After the sweeping success of Everything Everywhere All at Once at the Academy Awards earlier this month, The Daniels’ bizarro action-comedy finally achieved another milestone: The film’s theatrical re-release in reaction to its awards hype finally pushed it past $75 million at the domestic box office. This commercial achievement further cements Everything Everywhere All at Once as indie film magnate A24’s most successful project to date, and the touching multiverse family action-comedy’s performance will undoubtedly pave the way for the film studio to make an untold number of independent filmmakers’ dreams come true.
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Meanwhile, Sony’s vampire superhero abomination Morbius is sitting at just $73 million domestically, despite their own best efforts to re-release the film following the emergence of the “It’s Morbin’ Time” meme. Absent context, Everything Everywhere All at Once barely beating a movie of which the only major cultural contribution was a joke about how nobody in the world actually watched it at the domestic box office feels slightly less triumphant than winning a gold trophy.
As SlashFilm pointed out, most of the money made by Morbius came from overseas ticket sales — its worldwide total of $167.5 million still exceeds Everything Everywhere All at Once’s $114.9 million. However, considering the production and marketing costs associated with a film as massive and hyped as Sony’s Marvel tie-in, their nine-figure sum still falls well short of what would make it a success.
On the other hand, Everything Everywhere All at Once’s box office performance shows that low-to-mid budget films full of style and substance (two things Morbius was severely lacking) have a place in the Hollywood ecosystem that, recently, has only seemed to favor either mega-budget Marvel blockbusters or shoestring arthouse projects.
It’s always a good sign when the box office rewards moviemakers who take a risk. A24 took a leap by funding a maximalist sci-fi epic with grounded and real family relationships at its core, and it paid off in droves. Sony played it safe by having Jared Leto drink Matt Smith’s blood in the middle of a crowded McDonald’s, then smile at the camera and say, “I’m lovin’ it.”
For all you know, that last part actually happened. It’s not like you watched Morbius either.
