Movie Monday: ‘Send Help’ Needs No Assistance Ascending the Box Office, Best TV Shows to Binge Watch

It turns out that when you name your movie as a plea for assistance, audiences will answer the call. 

To be fair, Send Help is a Sam Raimi horror movie distributed by Disney, so it’s bound to generate some numbers. Those digits amount to a $20 million domestic open and a $28.1 million worldwide release, making it seem like Raimi got all the help he needs.

But look down at second place, and you’ll find out why YouTube is so influential. Mark Fischbach—better known by his popular YouTube channel Markiplier—generated $17.8 million in the United States for his horror movie, Iron Lung. The self-funded, self-produced and self-acted film is based on his playthrough of a video game of the same name. With a worldwide gross of $21.7 million on top of the reportedly $3 million the film cost to make, the blood-soaked movie seems like it was a highly profitable venture for Fischbach.

Third place went to documentary Melania—its spot earned after generating roughly 60% more revenue than initially forecasted. It opened to $7 million with domestic audiences (worldwide numbers have yet to be revealed). Nevertheless, distributor Amazon will need the movie to make much more if it hopes to earn back the reportedly $75 million it spent on the venture.

And with three new releases taking up the top three spots, that puts long-standing box-office contender Zootopia 2 down in fourth. Still, the movie is Disney’s highest-grossing animated feature of all time, beating out last year’s Inside Out 2. It’s also managed to stay in the box office top five for 10 straight weeks. This time around, it added $5.8 million to its domestic pull (a 9% increase from last week). That raises its domestic gain to $409 million. And if you include its international numbers, Zootopia 2 sits at a very comfortable $1.8 billion.

Rounding out the top five is another newcomer: Shelter. The Jason Statham flick brought in $5.505 million with domestic audiences. Worldwide, the movie took in $13.2 million in its debut.

Looking at this list, you may notice that Avatar: Fire and Ash is absent. Yes, despite taking second place last week, the film finally fell out of the top five, barely edged out of fifth place with just $5.500 million—five grand less than Shelter. Still, I doubt James Cameron is feeling too blue about it; his movie has made $386 million domestically and $1.4 billion worldwide.

As for other releases, Arco (nominated for Best Animated Feature Film at the Oscars)re-released to audiences in 19^th place. It earned $412,000.

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