Director David Ayer’s The Beekeeper held its ground in its second weekend at the box office, making the most of no new competition and the audience’s declining interest in Mean Girls. Retaining the number two spot domestically, the action film grossed over $8 million, while passing a significant milestone worldwide thanks to a solid performance in China. Starring Jason Statham, The Beekeeper has now made $31 million in domestic theaters, and another $45 million from overseas markets, for a cumulative global haul of $75 million in just 10 days of release. The film’s biggest foreign markets are China ($9.5 million), the Middle East ($5.6 million), Germany and Austria ($5.5 million), Mexico ($2.5 million), and the U.K. ($2.7 million). The Beekeeper is now the top movie of the year globally, ahead of Mean Girls ($66 million).
The film’s surprising success continues an uneven post-pandemic era for Statham, who last starred in the notorious underperformer Expend4bles, which ended its global run with just $51 million against a reported $100 million budget. Before that, he starred in Meg 2: The Trench, which grossed nearly $400 million worldwide. Around the same time last year, Statham headlined one of his least-successful films, Guy Ritchie’s Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, which grossed only $6.5 million domestically.
Celebrations are also in order for director Ayer, who hasn’t had a wide theatrical release since 2016’s Suicide Squad. While commercially successful, the discourse around the movie hurt Ayer’s career; the filmmaker was hot off his best-reviewed film — the World War II drama Fury — and had already lined up a potential franchise-starter for Netflix, Bright. Direct sequels to both Bright and Suicide Squad were abandoned, and Ayer instead directed the little-seen crime film The Tax Collector, which was released to negligible attention during the pandemic.
Can ‘The Beekeeper’ Hit $100 Million Globally on the Back of Positive Reviews?
Reviews for The Beekeeper have been positive, with the film earning a 71% approval rating on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. It also scored a B+ CinemaScore from opening day audiences, and a positive review from Collider’s Nate Richard, who wrote, “Jason Statham and David Ayer more than deliver on this action premise, making for one of the most wild mainstream action movies to hit the big screen in a while.” The Beekeeper also stars Emmy Raver-Lampman, Minnie Driver, Phylicia Rashad, Jeremy Irons and Josh Hutcherson, who also recently experienced a comeback with the record-breaking Five Nights at Freddy’s.
