Denzel Washington's 'The Little Things' Leads Box Office Despite HBO Max Debut

Denzel Washington. (AP)
Denzel Washington. (AP)
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Denzel Washington's 'The Little Things' Leads Box Office Despite HBO Max Debut

Denzel Washington. (AP)
Denzel Washington. (AP)

Would audiences pay to see a new movie on the big screen if they could watch the same title at home from the comfort of their couch? Prior to the pandemic, the response from theater operators and cinema purists would have been a resounding “no.”

Yet Hollywood is finding that, at least while a plague of Biblical proportion rages, the answer is: sorta.

“The Little Things,” a crime thriller starring Denzel Washington and Rami Malek, topped domestic box office charts, debuting to $4.8 million from 2,171 venues in North America. At the same time, it was available to HBO Max subscribers for a monthly fee that’s less than a single movie ticket in some parts of the country. “The Little Things” is one of 17 films from Warner Bros. that will premiere simultaneously in cinemas and on the HBO Max streaming service.

In normal times, those box office receipts would spell disaster. But today, it actually ranks as one of the stronger COVID-era opening weekends. HBO Max didn’t report how many viewers opted to stream “The Little Things.” However, Warner Bros. and its parent company WarnerMedia said the film “immediately shot up to No. 1” on HBO Max. It’s unclear what that benchmark means.

“We are absolutely thrilled by how Warner Bros.’ ‘The Little Things’ is performing on HBO Max -- it immediately shot up to number one, where it currently remains,” said HBO Max executive VP and general manager Andy Forssell. “Following the breakthrough success of ‘Wonder Woman 1984,’ ‘The Little Things’ shows the insatiable appetite our audience has for high quality, feature films.”

John Lee Hancock directed “The Little Things,” which centers on two police officers trying to catch a serial killer. Overseas, where HBO Max is not yet available, “The Little Things” kicked off with $2.8 million from 18 countries. The R-rated action film had the strongest showing in Russia with $1.1 million in sales, followed by Saudi Arabia with $871,000.

Still, these are bleak times for movie theater operators. Any film exhibitors hoping that ticket sales could return to pre-pandemic levels in 2021 were stymied by another round of release date delays. Earlier in January, MGM postponed the James Bond sequel “No Time to Die” from April to October. That prompted rival studios to once again push their films scheduled for early 2021, such as “Morbius,” “Ghostbusters Afterlife,” “Cinderella,” and “A Quiet Place Part II.” It’s also widely expected that Universal will delay “Fast & Furious” installment “F9” (set for May 28) and Disney may bump the Marvel adventure “Black Widow” (set for May 7), which would clear the film calendar until at least June.

Should that come to pass, it would be devastating to those in the business of showing movies on the big screen. By summer, it’ll have been over a year since theaters have operated at normal levels. Most US venues have already gone 10 months without much -- if any -- revenue.

In some ways, the theatrical market is equally as impaired as it was last March when theaters were entirely closed. As of late January, around 65% of theaters remain shuttered and those that reopened have been running at limited capacity. It seems that conversations about reopening theaters in major markets like New York City and Los Angeles have been all but abandoned. A botched COVID-19 vaccine rollout, combined with new strains of the virus, have only further complicated plans to get people back to the movies.

Box office analysts predict the theatrical business will get back to normal in 2022. David A. Gross, who runs the movie consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research, says that timeline is based on “healthy demand for quality, reasonably priced, out-of-home entertainment.”

“The vaccination process will pick up through the spring as the supply bottlenecks open up,” Gross said. “The government will spend whatever it takes to make the vaccination campaign successful, including overcoming the new COVID variants.”

Elsewhere at the domestic box office, Universal and DreamWorks Animation’s “The Croods: A New Age” collected $1.84 million in its 10th week of release, enough for second place. Those ticket sales represent a 2% increase from last weekend, which is impressive because the animated family film has been available to rent on home entertainment for almost two months. It has made $43.9 million in North America. Overseas, “The Croods” sequel made $1.3 million, bringing it past the $100 million mark for a global total of $144.38 million.

“Wonder Woman 1984” came in third place with $1.3 million from 1,864 locations. The Warner Bros. superhero adaptation, which premiered concurrently on HBO Max, has brought in $39.2 million after six weeks in North American theaters. To illustrate how depreciated the box office is, the original “Wonder Woman” grossed $38 million in its first day in theaters in 2017. Internationally, “Wonder Woman 1984” added another $1.1 million, bringing box office receipts to $112.8 million overseas and $152 million globally.

Liam Neeson’s action thriller “The Marksman” plunged to the No. 4 spot after leading the box office the last two weekends. It made $1.25 million in its third outing for a domestic tally of $7.8 million. The movie is currently playing in 2,018 theaters.

Rounding out the top five was Sony’s “Monster Hunter” with $740,000 in its seventh week of release. The film, an adaptation of a popular video game, has generated $11.1 million to date.



Ari Aster Made a Movie About Polarized America. ‘Eddington’ Has Been Polarizing

Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)
Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)
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Ari Aster Made a Movie About Polarized America. ‘Eddington’ Has Been Polarizing

Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)
Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)

A Post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote “Eddington”: “Remember the phones.”

“Eddington” may be set during the pandemic, but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data center is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents — their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data center — are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other’s sense of reality.

“We’re living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is,” Aster says. “Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder.”

“It’s important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird.”

Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films — “Hereditary,” “Midsommar,” “Beau Is Afraid” — have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment.

“Eddington,” which A24 releases in theaters Friday, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the US. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix’s bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal’s elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream.

At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, “Eddington” dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn’t imagine avoiding it. “To not be talking about it is insane,” he said.

“I’m desperate for work that’s wrestling with this moment because I don’t know where we are. I’ve never been here before,” says Aster. “I have projects that I’ve been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don’t know why I would make those right now.”

Predictably polarizing

“Eddington,” appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster’s film has had one of the most polarizing receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. “I don’t know what you think,” he told the crowd.

Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. “Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries,” wrote The New Yorker’s Justin Chang. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: “Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he’s saying something about America, the joke is on him.”

Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around “Eddington.”

“I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that’s pretty disingenuous,” he says. “In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives.”

For Aster, satirizing the left doesn’t mean he doesn’t share their beliefs. “If there’s no self-reflection,” he says, “how are we ever going to get out of this?”

Capturing ‘what was in the air’

Aster began writing “Eddington” in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn’t start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled “Eddington” as a Western with smartphones in place of guns — though there are definitely guns, too.

“The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I’ve been living with that level of dread ever since,” Aster says. “I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air.”

Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today’s corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like “Eddington,” though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million-budgeted “Beau Is Afraid” struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year’s speculative war drama, “Civil War.”

And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in “Beau Is Afraid,” and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that “it’s very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this.” For Phoenix, “Eddington” offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience.

“We were all terrified and we didn’t fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position,” Phoenix earlier told The AP. “And in some ways it’s so obvious: Well, that’s not going to be helpful.”

‘A time of total obscenity’

Since Aster made “Eddington” — it was shot in 2024 — the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film.

“I would have made the movie more obscene,” he says. “And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we’re living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I’ve seen.”

“Eddington” is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western.

But whatever you make of “Eddington,” you might grant it’s vitally important that we have more films like it — movies that don’t tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn’t sound finished with what he started.

“I’m feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I’m looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?” Aster says. “Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off, or fortressed off, a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to reengage with each other?”