Moviegoers gleefully make themselves look like Jackasses, Moonfall is a Moonfail, The Worst Person in the World is mega-popular, and Other Box Office News.

Note: this article originally ran on Set the Tape (link).

THANK FORK!  MOVIES AT LAST!  The fort-month of Spider-Man has finally been brought to end!  A reign of terror overthrown by the likeliest of saviours!  No, not Roland Emmerich’s latest gloriously stupid star-studded disaster-in-more-ways-than-one flick.  He hasn’t had a proper hit in over a decade!  Although our heroes are also throwback refugees from a time where we could all delude ourselves into thinking that society’s greatest threat was not ravenous unchecked capitalism and an Overton window steadily shifting ever rightwards via insidious normalisation, but rather nine dudebros creatively finding new ways to nail each other in the nads.  Yes, it’s those loveable Jackass boys, now significantly more loveable after dumping Bam Margera’s arse, back one last time with a proper movie to send off the iconic series for a generation of YouTube douchebags who misconstrue what “pranks” really entail.

Eleven years does not appear to have dulled the public’s love of these idiots debasing themselves much of any, either.  Whilst falling off significantly from Jackass 3D’s ginormous $50 million opening, Jackass Forever gleefully made Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall cry “Oklahoma!” with $23.5 million to the latter’s pitiful $10 million, which was just barely enough to hold back the No Way Home beast for that second place.  In fact, and in spite of estimations to the contrary going into the weekend, Forever’s take is just enough to keep it above the first Jackass movie on the opening charts; the 2002 film having opened to $22.7 million!  Turns out the cure for both COVID and COVID-related cinema blues was footage of a chair-strapped honey-covered Danger Ehren sharing a room with a hungry bear!  Who needs vaccines?

[Set the Tape would like to make it abundantly clear that the last sentence was a joke.  Everyone needs vaccines to help deal with COVID.  Get vaccinated, for fuck’s sake.]

But a truly healthy theatrical ecosystem needs variety in order to recover and thrive!  It’s all well and good throwing exorbitant amounts of money and theatres at the Jackass crew, and I guess also Roland Emmerich is here, but what about the indies?!  What about the Limited Releases?  Especially in the doldrums of Q1 which even in The Before Times used to just be a miserable period of things.  Well, GOOD NEWS, EVERYONE!  We have an arthouse hit on our hands!  The highly-buzzed about latest from notorious miserablist Joaquim Trier, dark rom-com The Worst Person in the World, has provided a long-overdue win for distributor Neon, perpetual bronze medallists in the Film Twitter Olympics.  Perhaps because four years with the actual worst person in the world in charge of America had conditioned folks’ tolerance for alleged terrible people, Trier’s triumph took $135,042 from four theatres, a PTA of $33,670.  According to professional writer people on Twitter, that’s the third-best PTA of These Uncertain Times, behind only Licorice Pizza and No Way Home because even when we’re trying not to talk about Spider-Man we’re apparently going to be talking about Spider-Man.

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Hi, I’m Callie Petch!  Welcome to the Full List!

US Box Office Results: Friday 4th February 2022 – Sunday 6th February 2022

1] Jackass Forever

$23,500,000 / NEW

…I haven’t seen it yet.  Trust me, I am beyond miffed that I was unable to finally see a proper Jackass movie in a packed cinema on opening night with a hot crowd.  But this is why you should always make sure to triple-check the date of your car’s MOT when buying so you don’t get surprised by its sudden expiration and end up grounded until you can arrange an emergency service.  I have learned this valuable lesson and pass my knowledge onwards to you, dear reader, so you can avoid the same fate in future.  Tawny Farber says the film’s a riot which is info I’m not the least bit jealous about.

2] Moonfall

$10,005,000 / NEW

I’m starving for a fun, goofy yet mostly straight-faced throwback disaster flick as much as the next person, if only as a novelty, but it might be time to admit that Emmerich and Dean Devlin only made a single good one of this kind of thing and we should stop expecting that either of them will turn in something decent ever again.  Accept this truth now before I start seeing Hot Takes about how the ’98 US Godzilla they made was underrated.

3] Spider-Man: No Way Home

$9,600,000 / $748,951,607

Turns out No Way Home is still yet to open in China but, crucially and unlike the last two MCU films, will be getting a release in the region at some point soon.  So, err, I’m just gonna retract that firm claim from last week about the thing definitely having no chance of breaking $2 billion.

4] Scream

$4,730,256 / $68,940,000

Speaking of scary movie throwbacks, the Woman in Black movie with Daniel Radcliffe turned 10 last week.  You may remember it as the reason why horror films in the UK are uniformly rated 15 and above now because the “a” in “12a” that Black got slapped with was doing far too much heavy lifting.  Amy Walker does not talk about that history, but she does look at how the film revitalised Hammer Horror!

5] Sing 2

$4,170,000 / $139,577,925

Been seeing a few of the very latest Simpsons episodes and, please God, cancel the show already.  Not so much because of writing degradation, but to stop the degradation of poor Julie Kavner’s voice.  She cannot do the Marge voice anymore and it’s actively painful to hear her try, like when your 50-year-old mum tries over and over to nail the sick kickflip she could bust out on the reg at age 16 and instead just keeps cracking the skateboard in her taint.

6] The King’s Man

$1,184,000 / $35,806,091

If you’re looking for a more effective action-comedy-drama-sorta-superhero hybrid than Matthew Vaughn’s lame duck of a prequel, Charlie Brigden may have the cure for what ails yer.  He’s been checking out the Russian feature Petrov’s Flu, currently playing in select theatres.

7] Redeeming Love

$1,010,225 / $8,076,000

So, I’ve had to spend much of the last week living with an album whose review is going up on Friday.  It’s not a very interesting album despite the band throwing everything and the Pro Tools-edited kitchen sink at these lifeless songs.  After the third straight spin trying to find something of substance to grab onto, I took a break to throw on the lead single from the new Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever and… jeez, the contrast in energy, songwriting, hookiness, and just general quality in the opening ten seconds was stratospheric!  Which I realise now sounds like I’m damning RBCF with the faintest of praise.  Not intentional, they fucking rule even when not acting as musical cocaine after an enforced binge on musical Xanax and this metaphor has collapsed ABORT MOVE ON.

8] American Underdog

$800,000 / $25,882,720

Hear there’s a Sportsball game on at the weekend and everybody is supposed to pick a side to support.  Well, I don’t like to be left out of the fun, so I would now like to officially declare on this very website on behalf of the entire staff that Set the Tape is fully behind [INSERT PREFERRED SPORTSBALL TEAM HERE]!  Go, [INSERT PREFERRED SPORTSBALL TEAM HERE]!

9] The 355

$700,000 / $14,177,390

Peaches is doing a twentieth anniversary tour of The Teaches with Peaches in June.  Besides the fact that tickets are pricey and I’m already tempting the COVID devil multiple times a week in a carefully orchestrated gig-shaped house of cards that month, my main hang-up to buying tix are that I’m still too angry at the moment about The 355’s usage of “Boys Wanna Be Her” in the end credits to listen back to Peaches.  NO!  WRONG!  YOU DON’T GET TO PLAY THAT SONG, MOVIE!  SIT IN THE CORNER AND THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU’VE DONE!

10] The Wolf and the Lion

$675,027 / NEW

No clue, either.  Let me instead direct your attention to the fact that Monsters, Inc. is now 20 years old in the UK.  Gonna be a lot of horrible anniversaries like that this year and I am not prepared for them.  Lachlan Haycock stared into Father Time’s terrifying jowls to serve a commemorative write-up.

Dropped out: Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Licorice Pizza, West Side Story

Callie Petch was taking shots like Avedon.