Warner Bros’ animation film Mummies (Mummie – A spasso nel tempo) has climbed all the way to the top of the Italian box office for the week ending February 26. The Juan Jesus Garcia Galocha-directed movie about the adventures of three mummies in present-day London has grossed €408,158 during the weekend, with total receipts of over €700,000. Mummies, as expected, has dethroned the popular Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, now in second place with a total of over €4.7 million.

The good news for Italian domestic production is that finally a made-in-Italy comedy is doing very well and thriving in third position: Alessandro Siani’s Tramite amicizia (Through Friendship) has grossed over €200,000 over the week, with a total of almost €3 million since its release, a very good result by Italian film standards. Tramite amicizia  features Italian Tik Tok star Valeria Angione, 28, making her acting debut.  She became famous in the pre-Covid era with 830,000 followers on Instagram and about half a million on Tik Tok and Facebook. She wrote the best-selling book Riparti da te (2001) and took the theatrical tour Riparto da me all over Italy, attracting enthusiastic young and not-so-young audiences.

Good results for Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale, with a weekly gross of  €234.000 and a total of  €606,000. Italian moviegoers were fascinated by the drama/thriller with heavily made-up Brendan Fraser as an obese man in search of redemption; the former The Mummy and George of the Jungle star once beloved by young audiences is now in the heat of the race for an Oscar win.

Marc Foster’s A Man Called Otto (re-titled Non cosi’ vicino in Italy — the long-standing tradition of changing the original foreign titles seems to persist), starring Tom Hanks, hasn’t done that well in Italian theaters with €163,000 for the week with a total just shy of a million euros. It was followed by Romantiche (€84.000, total €250.000 since its debut on February 23), another Italian comedy directed and starring Pilar Fogliati, who also co-wrote with veteran writer/director Giovanni Veronesi.  This “episodes movie” is about four young women in Rome and its outskirts who tell their stories to their psychologist (Barbara Bulova); they are all played by the same actress (Fogliati), a comedienne specializing in impressions.

The Banshees of Inisherin held up well in eighth position grossing €60,000 and just shy of 2 million euros total. The top 10 at the Italian week box office is rounded up by the French animated comedy Argonauts – Mission Olimpo (Epic Tales) with €43,000 and a total of €612,000, and Oliver Park’s The Offering (total €158,000 euros).

The total for the weekend Italian box office for the top ten films was about €800,000, which is a respectable amount, locally speaking. The total for all the films screened in the peninsula’s theaters was close to a million euros.

Box office data were provided by Cinetel, which tracks cinema attendance and ticket sales, and other media outlets, including the Italian National Association of Cinema Exhibitors (ANEC), and Box Office Italia.  There are approximately 3,500 movie screens in Italy, according to data from the European Audiovisual Observatory.