Blumhouse and Universal shrugged off the coronavirus and opened their horror remake The Invisible Man to $29.0 million. The Elisabeth Moss – led thriller, an update of the horror classic based on the original H.G. Wells novel and its 1933 film adaptation, took first place at home but only managed second abroad with its $20 million debut hampered by virus fears in Europe and now Latin America. Moss plays Cecilia Kass, who is in an abusive relationship with her scientist boyfriend Adrian Griffin, played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen. 

Top foreign plays include the UK where it made $2.86 million and France where the film managed to take home another $2.2 million. In Mexico, where horror films typically do well, it made $1.85 million while it took $1.1 million back in Spain.

Second place at home went to Sonic the Hedgehog. Paramount’s video game adaptation made $16 million during its third week in US theaters and reached global cumulative earnings of just over $265 million. It’s now the third-largest video game adaption of all time domestically. First place in the category belongs to last year’s Detective Pikachu, from Warner Bros, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, also from Paramount, which opened in 2001. Sonic, famous for zooming around colorful maps to an upbeat electronic soundtrack in search of gold rings, had solid debuts in Indonesia ($2 million) and Poland ($1.1 million.) The UK, at $22.3 million, is its biggest market.

Farther down the chart Disney’s Call of the Wild had a second frame showing of just $13.2 million, against its blockbuster $150 million budget. Disney took a big gamble carrying on one of Fox’s riskiest productions, a PG adaptation of a decidedly not PG novel whose main character is a Saint Bernard whose internal monologue is conveyed by an imagined narrative voice. Not enough children who read it seem to be interested in the story and older fans were not attracted to the family-friendly format. It made $11 million in 62 other territories to reach $79 million.

Back overseas, STX’s Guy Ritchie directed The Gentlemen was the next biggest film on the combined chart. $9.5 million was enough for first place on the foreign table, while it didn’t crack the top ten with $1 million in the US. Counting all its plays until now, this quippy English crime drama has earned a grand total of $101.8 million since it came out on New Year’s Day in the UK.

Next week we have an animated feature, Onward, and Ben Affleck’s sports drama The Way Back opening in the US. But with a rash of new cases of COVID-19 in the West and now also in the East Coast expectations are low.

See the latest box office estimates: