Aug 14, 2023

Mutant Mayhem" adds $15.8M domestic, $10.4M international in second weekend of release

Paramount Pictures' "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem": Mutant Mayhem took third place at the domestic box office in its second weekend, earning an estimated $15.8 million.

The latest entry in the TMNT universe, directed by Jeff Lowe, grossed $72.8 million in its first two weeks in North American cinemas. This total is just $10 million short of the lifetime domestic box office for 2016's live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, the last theatrical feature film in the franchise. The domestic box office for "Mutant Mayhem" is already well ahead of the last fully animated Turtles feature to be released theatrically, 2007's "TMNT," which grossed $54.1 million.

"Mutant Mayhem" was produced by Nickelodeon Movies and Point Grey Productions on a cheap budget of $70 million. This is especially impressive considering that Lowe and producer Seth Rogan were careful not to overwork the artists at Paris and Canada's Micros Animation and Cinesite Vancouver. (For more on the economics of feature animation this summer, see last week's article.)

With "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" still going strong, the first two weeks of "Turtles" were mega-competitive. Nevertheless, there is not much competition for children and families, and even less so if we focus only on animation. Disney's live-action "The Haunted Mansion" was a flop, and Pixar's "Elemental" fell out of the top 10 despite earning an additional $713,000 in its ninth week. Meanwhile, Sony's Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was in its eighth and final week at the box office, with the film playing in only 258 theaters over the weekend, compared to 3,950 for Mutant Mayhem.

Worldwide, "Turtles" finished the weekend in fifth place, bringing in $10.4 million from foreign markets. Its worldwide gross for the weekend was $26.2M, bringing its two-week total to $94.7M.