Steven Spielberg is the high scorer at the box office this Easter weekend. The director’s retrofuturistic sci-fi adventure Ready Player One is on track to debut with about $41.2 million from 4,234 theaters in the U.S. and Canada from Friday to Sunday, easily outpacing fellow new release Acrimony and holdovers including Pacific Rim Uprising and Black Panther.
Factoring in Thursday, when Ready Player One officially launched, the film is headed for a $53.2 million bow. That’s a solid, if not spectacular start for a film that reportedly cost between $150 million and $175 million to produce, and it marks the second-best opening of the year, behind Black Panther. Ready Player One is also doing brisk business overseas, grossing an estimated $128 million in 62 territories this weekend, including $61.7 million in China.
Directed by Spielberg and based on the novel by Ernest Cline (who cowrote the script with Zak Penn), Ready Player One received generally positive reviews from critics and an A-minus CinemaScore from moviegoers, suggesting good word-of-mouth potential.
The movie stars Tye Sheridan as a high school student in a dystopian future who embarks on a digital quest to win dominion over the Oasis, an immensely popular virtual-reality world infused with ’80s and ’90s pop culture nostalgia. The cast also includes Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, and Mark Rylance.
Coming in second place is Tyler Perry’s psychological thriller Acrimony, with an estimated $17.1 million from 2,006 theaters. The Lionsgate release will surpass industry projections, which had it…
