A hedgehog and a vampire brought down Batman in a week filled with surprising new releases. And the country’s overall box office climbed to over a million in sold tickets and 10 million in receipts for the first time in weeks.

1,11 million people bought cinema tickets worth € 10 million this last weekend, which was largely attributed to the return of winter with snowfall in some areas and temperatures hovering around zero degrees centigrade. Sonic the Hedgehog 2, a new intergalactic adventure for the blue animal, won the weekend with € 1,8 million followed by Morbius and The Batman, all of which broke the million mark.

Oscar-winner Jared Leto who slipped into the role of Marvel vampire Morbius, whose creation happened thanks to an experiment in a biochemical lab, was expected to win the week against The Batman, not lose the number one debut due to a stinger named Sonic. Those were the predictions, even though he came in a close second with € 1,65 million. With The Batman now in the number three spot, crime drama Die Gangster Gang held relatively steady in fourth place.

Jujutsu Kaisen O (KAZÉ Anime Nights) by Park Seong-hu is the real big surprise for regular movie fans here, although its grand debut was expected by Animé lovers who made the original series the number one hit on Crunchyroll, a specialized streaming service for the genre in 2021. While the series focused on a group of young high school students and centered on its leader, the character Yuji Itadori, the film version is concentrated around the older pupil, Yuta Okkotsu, and how is accepted into the world of the Jujucists. In the Jujutsu Kaisen world, every being expels cursed energy that manifests itself as a monster out of negative emotions. While normal humans cannot fight this transformation, the Jujucists are capable of controlling their energy flow and break the curse. Yuta Okkotsu has felt cursed since the day he witnessed the death of his friend Rita as a child, a girl he had promised to marry later. She returns as a ghost and the shy boy develops suicidal tendencies until he meets the powerful Satoru Gojo who teaches him how to control and transform the curse. The story’s conflict tightens when another Jujucist decides to use his powers not for the good but for the bad and sends a thousand curses to the cities of Shinjuku and Kyoto.

In sixth spot is the action-adventure Uncharted, followed by the thriller Ambulance, family film Die Häschenschule – Jagd nach dem Goldenen Ei, the comedy Wunderschön and the turkish drama Bergen.

In Austria, Sonic stung his way into an even more successful start than in Germany with almost € 400.000 in sold tickets which is slightly more than its predecessor, the original Sonic the Hedgehog made on the weekend of its release in February of 2020 – before the pandemic and all the lockdowns. In second place is Morbius, but then the charts start to differ from their neighbors’. The Austrian caricaturist biopic Rotzbub – Willkommen in Siegheilkirchen slipped from two to three, with Die Häschenschule – Der Große Eierklau and Die Gangster Gang rounding out the top five. Missing someone here? Yes, The Batman fell all of five places to number six this week. The Anime hit Jujutsu Kaisen O started in ninth. In between is Schnick Schnack Schnuck and Uncharted with Ambulance in tenth place.