This Week’s Weekend POURcast Is LOADED!
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 just stay home and let your couch absorb your personality. It’s your weekend movie plan with a little booze, a little box office, and just enough cynicism to keep everybody honest.
This weekend’s theatrical board is super crowded. There are five new wide releases hitting theaters: Mother Mary, Amrum, Michael, Over Your Dead Body, and Desert Warrior. That is a much busier weekend than the last few weeks, when one or two titles did most of the heavy lifting while everyone else fought for the bottom three spots in the top five.
That matters because last weekend’s chart still belonged to the same two monsters at the top. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie stayed number one with about $36.5 million, Project Hail Mary held second with about $20.5 million, and Lee Cronin’s The Mummy debuted in third place with $13.5 million. After that, things dropped off fast: The Drama took fourth with $4.8 million, while You, Me & Tuscany landed fifth with $3.9 million.
Last Weekend in Review
Last weekend was basically a reminder that the top of the 2026 box office is still being run by giant, obvious crowd-pleasers. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie pushed its domestic total past $356 million by the end of the April 17-19 weekend, while Project Hail Mary climbed above $285 million domestic and kept proving it has stronger legs than a lot of people expected.
The more interesting story was lower on the chart. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy did fine, not huge, opening with a $13.5 million domestic start, while Normal opened really soft at around $2.6 million. That tells you something useful heading into this weekend: adult audiences will show up, but only when the hook is worth the trip. Which is why this week’s five-wide-release traffic jam could either energize the market or turn into a very expensive knife fight.
New in Theaters This Weekend
(courtesy of Box Office Mojo)
Michael
This is the biggest swing of the weekend and probably the one with the clearest path to first place among the newcomers. It has built-in recognition, curiosity, controversy, and the kind of broad generational awareness that can pull in both casual moviegoers and people who normally wait for streaming. Early reviews were very soft, but a few late reviews actually make it sound a little better than initially suspected.
Mother Mary
A24 goes wide with Mother Mary, which already sounds like the kind of movie that will have film people arguing in parking lots and online by Friday night. Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, and Hunter Schafer in a drama-music-thriller is an awfully strong way to announce that you are not here to behave. It may not be the most commercial play of the weekend, but it absolutely has prestige-chaos energy.
Over Your Dead Body
This one is still doing a lot of the marketing work with the title alone. It reads like adult-skewing counterprogramming with a slightly unhinged grin, which is not the worst lane to occupy in a weekend full of bigger studio noise. The question is whether it can actually cut through the noise now that it has to compete with Michael and Mother Mary at the same time.
Desert Warrior
Also wide this weekend, Desert Warrior looks like one of those titles trying to muscle its way into the conversation through scale and genre rather than awards-y heat or music-biopic familiarity. In a less crowded weekend it might have had more space to breathe. This weekend, it may need to settle for becoming somebody’s “wait, that’s out too?” discovery.
Amrum
Then there is Amrum, another wide release, which gives the weekend one more adult-facing option on top of everything else. That is the thing about this weekend: there is not just one challenger coming for the holdovers. There are several, and they are all trying to claim overlapping pieces of the audience. Amrum may not be the loudest of the bunch, but in a weekend like this, clarity and reviews can sometimes do more work than volume. Still, this is art-house all the way for American audiences.
Weekend POURcast Box Office Forecast: April 24th-26th, 2026
1. Michael
$42M to $58M
This feels like the strongest bet among the new releases. The awareness is there, the subject is massive, and the weekend needs something besides Mario to behave like an event. If it hits, it probably hits hard.
2. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
$24M to $34M
Mario is not going to vanish just because a music biopic shows up. It still has family gravity, name recognition, and enough momentum to stay near the top even with stronger competition than it faced last weekend.
3. Project Hail Mary
$14M to $19M
This thing just keeps hanging around like a smart movie that refuses to die. Even with more adult competition arriving this weekend, it has already proven it can hold well and keep siphoning off the audience that wants scale without cartoon mushrooms or tabloid baggage.
4. Mother Mary
$8M to $10M
Of the non-Michael newcomers, this feels like the one with the strongest combination of visibility, curiosity, and critical-conversation potential. It may not go full breakout, but it has a real shot to become the weekend’s prestige winner.
5. Desert Warrior, Over Your Dead Body, and Amrum
$4M or less each
This is where the weekend gets messy. Any of these could land here, and that probably comes down to which one has the clearest hook by Friday night. That is not a bug. That is the whole charm of a crowded release weekend. Somebody is going to get squeezed.
New Movies on Streaming This Weekend
Of course, the Weekend POURcast isn’t JUST about the box office. If you are staying home, there is a new made for Netflix movie: Apex is one of the big at-home entries this weekend. It hits Netflix as a new thriller starring Charlize Theron, Taron Egerton, and Eric Bana about a grieving woman lured into a deadly wilderness hunt. That is a pretty solid “I do not feel like parking at The Grove” option.
The at-home menu also includes The Wolf and the Lamb, My Own Normal, Dirty Hands, Saturnalia, and Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks. So the couch Weekend POURcast has some range this week: survival thriller, smaller indies, a documentary lane, and at least a couple of titles with the kind of “maybe this is secretly good?” energy that streaming weekends live on.
Weekend Drink Pairing: Crystal Cut Cocktail
The Weekend POURcast cocktail pick this week is the Crystal Cut Cocktail, which is already live on CocktailsandMovies.com and described as a cold, elegant cocktail with a secret buried beneath the surface. That feels right for a weekend built around glossy surfaces, crowded commercial ambition, and at least a few movies that look like they may get stranger the longer you sit with them.
It also helps that the drink feels cool on the surface, razor-sharp underneath, and like it is holding something back until the exact right moment. That is a pretty great match for a weekend that includes a Michael Jackson biopic, an A24 music-thriller fever dream, and a Charlize Theron wilderness survival movie dropping on Netflix. The drink does not need to scream. It just needs to know exactly what it is doing.
Final Pour
This weekend POURcast outlook is not sleepy. It is crowded, competitive, and a little chaotic, which frankly is better for the movies than another weekend where everybody politely loses to the same two holdovers. Michael looks like the most likely new champ, Mother Mary has the most obvious prestige-weirdo upside, and Apex gives the stay-home crowd something slick and dangerous to queue up on Netflix. Meanwhile, Mario and Project Hail Mary are still sitting there like the last two guys left at the bar pretending they are not impressed by the new arrivals. Still, it WAS nice to hear that Amazon has no plans to move Project Hail Mary to streaming anytime soon. Good to see that good movies can make their space in the theaters with audiences.
Not a bad menu at all. A packed multiplex, a decent streaming bench, and a cocktail that looks elegant until it quietly cuts you. 🍸🍿
