Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One has been in theatres since March 29th, and it is now safe to say that it can be called a box office success., The film took the number one spot on its opening weekend and took in a decent $41.7 million. Almost a month later and its total in US sales currently stands at $126.1 million. The biggest weekend-to-weekend drop-off it suffered so far was 53.2 percent, which occurred between its second and third frames. Compared to other films this is a pretty good figure. Despite Ready Player One only holding the #1 position for just a single weekend, it’s been in the top 10 for the last four weeks.
This is a big win for Steven Spielberg. The director was once synonymous with successfully summer blockbusters, but in the last decade, he has seen a considerable decline in the sales of his movies. To be fair a lot of his films have been Oscar-contending historical dramas and those typically do not post large numbers. Very few people would have predicted that Ready Player One would be one of his biggest successes in the last several years.
The movie was considered pretty controversial on the internet prior to its release. Many people on Twitter and other social media platforms bashed the book the movie is based on for being a shallow nostalgia trip that would make a poor movie. In spite of this, positive word-of-mouth from viewers since the film’s release has propelled it to the high numbers is now enjoys. Even with its US success though the movie had a reported budget of $175 million so it would need to have done well in the international market in order to be considered a true financial success. Thankfully for Spielberg and fans of the movie it has done just that.
So far the movie has brought in $521.5 million globally as of the time of this article. This far exceeds its goal of $350 million in worldwide sales necessary to make all of its money back.