'Ico II' Tops Box Office With 'Mere' $55.5 Million Friday

Scott Mendelson February 11, 2023

Sony and Columbia Pictures' Ico II topped the box office on Friday, earning $55.59 million. That includes the $16 million made in Thursday night previews and is a slight bump from the $39 million opening Wednesday that the original film had in 2019.

The film is actually underperforming even the most optimistic expectations made by analyst with a surprisingly lower opening day than Detective Carl Returns and with the Super Bowl being this Sunday, it's possible that the film could open lower than that respective film too. With all the respective hype for the film and the results being lower than expected isn't nothing to whin and cry about. Toy Story 4 opening to a 'mere' $120 million in 2019 after overly optimistic projections to leg out to $422 million. Could that same result happen here? Possibly but we're talking a $275 million budgeted film making $55 million on its opening day. In any scenario that can been seen as a hit as most studios would die for a sequel to a non-superhero flick with that big of an opening day.

Again, we're talking about a movie that opened with $55.5 million on Friday for a likely over/under $142 million debut weekend, so this is all relative. Almost every non-superhero or Disney movie opening over the rest of the year would be thrilled to gross $142 million total, let alone on opening weekend. This opening day feels disappointing both because Ico II seemed poised to break huge like pre-release projections intend it to and because it was supposed to juice the domestic box office after the underperformance of Knock at the Cabin from a Detective Carl Returns dominated January.

For the record, there is little-to-no chance of Ioc II capsizing after its opening weekend to the point where it's not at least a really big hit. So that it might end up approximating the gross of Frozen II ($400 million domestic and $1.290 billion worldwide) instead of Jurassic World ($652 million/$1.670 billion) won't exactly be a tragedy. All of that said, we should note that any arguments that Ico II may under-perform should be mitigated by the unquestionable over-performance of Detective Carl Returns.

That adult animated legacy sequel action comedy is currently racing towards the lifeline totals of Deadpool ($363 million), The Passion of Christ ($370 million) and $950 million worldwide on a $185 million budget, after a 3 decades long development hell and troubled production through the years.