Bohemian Rhapsody Stuns With $141M Global Take

CNN reports:

“Bohemian Rhapsody” is the champion of the box office this weekend. The Queen biopic took the No. 1 spot with an estimated $50 million haul in North America and $141.7 million globally. That’s a great opening for the music biopic genre, and great news for 20th Century Fox, which spent $52 million to make it.

The story about ’70s-era British rock group Queen and its iconic front man, Freddie Mercury — played by Rami Malek — was projected to make closer to $35 million in the United States.

Fortune reports:



Mixed-negative reviews (mostly) didn’t matter. Controversies over historical accuracy and whether or not the film had nice things to say (or enough to say) about Freddie Mercury’s life as a bisexual man who died of AIDS didn’t matter. Bryan Singer getting fired and replaced by Dexter Fletcher didn’t matter.

The threat of more allegations against Singer concerning inappropriate and/or illegal sexual behavior didn’t matter. Nothing really mattered because folks wanted a big-budget, splashy, musically-focused Freddie Mercury biopic and Bohemian Rhapsody delivered just that. All the bad buzz in the world can’t kill a movie that people actually want to see.