The Weekend POURcast for this week looks scary good.
Every Friday, we here at Cocktails and Movies serve up the Weekend POURcast: a quick-hit look at what’s new in theaters, what might matter at the box office, what’s fresh on streaming, and what cocktail should be in your hand while you decide whether to leave the house or rot happily into your couch cushions. Think of it as your weekend movie plan with a little liquor and a little side-eye.
This weekend has more bite than last week. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is still the heavyweight in the room after leading the April 10-12 weekend, while Project Hail Mary kept holding strong and The Drama stayed alive in the upper tier. But now the box office marquee gets more interesting: Box Office Mojo lists Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, Lorne, and Normal as the weekend’s new wide releases, with additional theatrical arrivals including Mother Mary, The Whistler, American Solitaire, Sundays, and others joining the mix.
Last Weekend in Review
Last weekend was less about chaos and more about confirmation. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie stayed at number one with about $69 million in its second weekend, pushing past $300 million domestic, while Project Hail Mary held second with roughly $24.5 million and The Drama stayed in third with $8.7 million. You, Me & Tuscany opened with about $8 million, and Hoppers rounded out the Top 5 with around $4.1 million.
That matters because the holdovers are still strong enough that anything opening this weekend needs a very clear lane. Family audiences already have Mario. Adult sci-fi audiences already have Project Hail Mary. So the new arrivals need to sell either danger, prestige, or Bob Odenkirk beating the hell out of people. Which, to be fair, is a decent menu.
New in Theaters This Weekend
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
This is the weekend’s clearest commercial swing. Box Office Mojo lists Lee Cronin’s The Mummy as a wide Warner Bros. release, and its cast includes Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, and May Calamawy. The movie is positioned as straight horror, which is refreshing in an era when too many genre movies act embarrassed to admit what they are.
More importantly, horror still sells theatrical urgency better than almost anything outside giant family franchises. If audiences want something nastier after two weekends of Mario dominance, this is the movie with the best shot to shake up the mood of the room. Industry tracking cited by Koimoi, summarizing Box Office Pro estimates, has the film in roughly the $15 million to $20 million opening range, which sounds about right for a solid but not earth-shattering horror debut.
Normal
Normal absolutely belongs in this weekend’s box office conversation because it’s cast might sell it. Box Office Mojo lists it as a new wide release, and the film centers on a temporary small-town sheriff uncovering dark mysteries after a local bank robbery. That premise is already doing useful work before you even get to the part where Bob Odenkirk is the lead.
The bigger selling point is tone. Reviews out today describe it as a hyperviolent Ben Wheatley action-thriller with Odenkirk playing a drifting lawman in the town of Normal, Minnesota, where the surface calm is very much bullshit. That gives it a clean adult-skewing lane: grim, pulpy, deadpan, and built around a star audiences now fully accept as a battered action lead. It feels like the grounded counterprogramming option for people who want trouble without the supernatural wrapping.
Lorne
Lorne is the other major wide opener, a biography-documentary from Focus Features built around Lorne Michaels, with Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, and Colin Jost among the featured names. That gives it an immediate audience: comedy nerds, TV lifers, and anyone who enjoys stories about powerful behind-the-scenes weirdos quietly shaping culture from a control booth.
The commercial question is whether that audience shows up theatrically in big enough numbers to matter. This feels more niche and adult than breakout, but that does not mean it is irrelevant. It just means its success probably looks more like a respectable adult turnout than a surprise box office punch.
Mother Mary
Mother Mary is also in theaters this weekend, and on paper it sounds like exactly the kind of A24 fever dream that can become an online obsession before it becomes a wide crowd-pleaser. Box Office Mojo lists it with Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, and Hunter Schafer and tags it as a drama-music-thriller. Even if it is not the widest commercial play of the frame, it absolutely has “film people will not shut up about this” energy.
Other Notables
There is a decent specialty bench this weekend too. Box Office Mojo’s April 17 calendar also includes titles like The Whistler, American Solitaire, Sundays, Wasteman, Marama, and Mad Bills to Pay: (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo). So even if the top of the weekend is driven by Mario holdovers and a few wide new arrivals, the side shelf is pretty healthy.
Box Office Forecast: April 17th-19th, 2026
1. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
$25M to $30M
It is still the safest bet on the board. After a second weekend around $69 million and more than $300 million domestic total, Mario remains the default family choice until someone actually knocks it out.
2. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
$15M to $22M
This is the weekend’s most obvious challenger. Horror gives people a reason to go out, react together, and buy a ticket now instead of “later maybe.” The tracking chatter around the film suggests a mid-to-high teens opening is very plausible, with upside if audiences really want something louder and grosser than the current holdovers.
3. Project Hail Mary
$14M to $19M
After that strong hold last weekend, Project Hail Mary still looks durable. It may surrender some premium-screen and adult attention to the new openers, but it has already proved it has legs.
4. Normal
$7M to $12M
This is where things get fun. Normal feels commercially legible in a way that a lot of adult thrillers do not anymore: known lead, clean premise, violent edge, no homework required. It may not erupt, but it absolutely has a shot to become the weekend’s strongest adult genre alternative outside The Mummy.
5. Lorne or The Drama
$4M to $8M
Lorne has the advantage of being new and wide. The Drama has the advantage of already being established and holding well. This is the messiest slot on the board, and that usually means whichever movie has the clearest audience marching orders wins it.
New Movies on Streaming This Weekend
If you are staying home, Rotten Tomatoes’ at-home board is once again doing a decent amount of work. Titles listed for April 17 include Hive, Brothers Under Fire, Ramy Youssef: In Love, The Greatest of These: Presented by City of Refuge, Carl Jackson’s The Well, By His Hand, Return of the Mack: Back for da Smoke, and Artemis II: To the Moon and Back.
There are also some recent streaming arrivals just ahead of them worth clocking. Rotten Tomatoes shows All You Need Is Kill arriving April 14 with an 83% critics score and 88% audience score, while Slanted landed the same day with 69% from critics and 65% from audiences. That gives the couch crowd a decent split between promising, weird, and possibly kind of messy. Which, honestly, is also how most weekends in theaters work.
Weekend Drink Pairing: Fluid Karma Fizz Cocktail
This weekend’s cocktail pick is the Fluid Karma Fizz Cocktail, because the site itself describes it as “a chaotic cocktail for a chaotic movie,” plus “sweet, sharp, glowing, and slightly unstable.” That is a pretty perfect tonal match for a weekend where The Mummy is trying to raise hell, Normal is bringing violent small-town trouble, and Mother Marymay end up making half the internet argue.
It also gives you a strong internal-link play back into CocktailsandMovies.com instead of inventing some disposable one-off pairing that dies the second the article posts. Better SEO. Better structure. Less nonsense.
Final Pour
That’s it for this week’s Weekend POURcast. This weekend has a little more edge than the last one. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is still the champ until somebody actually scares it from the top spot, but Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is the first new release in a minute that feels like it might change the atmosphere, and Normal gives adult audiences a bruised, grimier alternative. Lorne is the civilized option, Mother Mary looks built for film-twitter chaos, and streaming keeps acting like the side buffet that never closes.
Not a bad menu, honestly. A giant family holdover, a fresh horror swing, a Bob Odenkirk wild card, and a cocktail that already sounds like trouble. 🍸🍿
