It was a very quiet weekend at the box office as moviegoers appear to be saving up their hard-earned money for multiple trips to see Avengers: Endgame next weekend. The Warner Bros./New Line horror film The Curse of La Llorona topped the weekend with a solid $26.5 million—above expectations—but overall it was the slowest Easter weekend since 2005, when the Ashton Kutcher-led Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner remake topped the charts. Remember that one? No? Alrighty then.
La Llorona is a 70s-set horror thriller produced by James Wan with tangential ties to The Conjuring universe, but while it suffered pretty negative reviews, audiences didn’t seem to mind all that much (see also: The Nun). The R-rated film cost only $9 million to make, and hails from director Michael Chaves who next helms The Conjuring 3.
Image via Warner Bros.
Coming in second place was Shazam!, dethroned in its third weekend but still performing strong with $17.3 million. That brings the DC superhero movie’s domestic total up to $121 million and its worldwide total has surpassed $322 million. The film will no doubt dip next weekend when Avengers: Endgame arrives, but given that Shazam! is neither a major comics property nor a movie star-led vehicle, these numbers are impressive.
In third place was the faith-based drama Breakthrough, a Christian-oriented film that drew $11 million on Easter weekend to bring its five-day total to $14.5 million. The movie hails from 20th Century Fox, but marks the first Fox film to be released following Disney’s acquisition of the studio.
Speaking of which, these low Easter numbers are (hopefully) due to the arrival of Avengers: Endgame next week, the highly anticipated Avengers: Infinity War sequel that’s being touted as the culmination of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe thus far, since 2008’s Iron Man. A consequence of this could be a solid bump that Captain Marvel received this weekend, which pulled in a surprising $9 million over a month and a half after its initial release. The Brie Larson-led superhero movie has grossed over $1.09 billion worldwide and surpassed The Dark Knight Rises this weekend to become the #8 global superhero movie of all time. Domestically, Captain Marvel has now become the seventh MCU movie to cross $400 million.
How high will Avengers: Endgame soar, and how long will it reign? The runway is fairly clear throughout May unless something like Detective Pikachu surprises big time, and Disney itself has staked out May 24th—a month after Endgame’s release—for the live-action remake of Aladdin. Of course that was the strategy employed for Solo: A Star Wars Story after Infinity War last year and we saw how that panned out, but it’ll be interesting to see how the Will Smith-led film performs.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, check out the weekend box office estimates below, and be sure to come back next weekend for a rundown of the sure-to-be-record-setting totals for Endgame.
| Rank | Title | Weekend | Total |
| 1. | The Curse of La Llorona | $26,505,000 | $26,505,000 |
| 2. | Shazam! | $17,340,000 | $121,341,951 |
| 3. | Breakthrough | $11,100,000 | $14,606,925 |
| 4. | Captain Marvel | $9,100,000 | $400,026,133 |
| 5. | Little | $8,451,000 | $29,380,410 |
| 6. | Dumbo | $6,800,000 | $101,254,910 |
| 7. | Pet Sematary | $4,850,000 | $49,583,075 |
| 8. | Missing Link | $4,369,756 | $12,976,997 |
| 9. | Us | $4,264,000 | $170,444,620 |
| 10. | Hellboy | $3,880,000 | $19,676,271 |