Novocaine, Black Bag, and Mickey 17 are going head to head in a dismal weekend for the 2025 box office. Novocaine, which is an action comedy starring Jack Quaid, and Black Bag, which is a Steven Soderberg-directed spy thriller starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett, are both new wide releases. The Mickey 17 release kicked off the week before. The Bong Joon Ho-directed Robert Pattinson sci-fi movie debuted at No. 1 with a record-breaking $19 million haul that was the Parasite director’s best in domestic history but still came nowhere close to its $118 million budget.
Per Variety, as of Saturday morning, projections are too close to call as to what will take No. 1 over the weekend at the domestic box office. Novocaine currently has the lead with a projected 3-day total of $8.5 million. Black Bag and Mickey 17 are both trailing slightly behind with the potential to catch up.
Meanwhile, the overall weekend is set to be the worst of 2025, with the entire slate of titles (which also includes Captain America: Brave New World, Opus, Paddington in Peru, and The Monkey) projected to earn just $52 million in domestic theaters, which would sink the weekend beneath the previous lows of Super Bowl weekend ($54.3 million) and Oscar weekend ($54.5 million).
What This Means For Novocaine

Its Box Office Future Is Unclear

Previous projections for the Novocaine release showed the action-comedy set to potentially breach $10 million during its opening weekend with a much clearer lead at the domestic box office. However, this setback does not necessarily mean that it will suffer in theaters. It had a relatively slim budget of just $18 million, which likely places its break-even point somewhere around $45 million. It could still be a stretch for the movie to hit that milestone, but it represents a relatively low risk for distributor Paramount Pictures.

Movies typically need to earn back at least two and a half times their budgets, because theaters keep half of ticket sales and marketing costs are not included in the production budget.

This quiet debut has happened in spite of the fact that Novocaine reviews are quite solid. The movie has earned a Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score of 81% with an even better audience score of 88%. However, the audience score could mean that the movie will balloon with good word of mouth. Should that be the case, it could follow in the footsteps of Jack Quaid’s January release Companion, a sci-fi thriller that cost $10 million and slowly and steadily made its money back with a $36.5 million gross worldwide after debuting at No. 2 with $9.3 million.
Our Take On The Weekend Box Office

March Could Continue To Be Brutal

The fact that Mickey 17, Novocaine, and Black Bag are struggling to prop up the domestic box office shows that the month is in desperate need of a tentpole. The release of the live-action Snow White remake next weekend will likely provide something of a boost, but even the Disney movie’s projections have been dwindling the nearer its debut comes. Thus, it may not be until the debuts of A Minecraft Movie in April or Marvel’s Thunderbolts* in May that the domestic box office properly rebounds after kicking off 2025 with a strong start that has quickly receded.
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Source: Variety