Sony’s Bad Boys: Ride or Die earned $5.875M in previews that began yesterday at 3pm, which is actually only 8% lower than the previews for the franchise’s last long-awaited threequel, 2020’s Bad Boys for Life, which earned $6.36M. This is a great start for Bad Boys: Ride or Die as it enters a market hampered by a shortage of movie inventory from the strike, and that doesn’t mean there aren’t any mass-appeal movies to watch other than Disney/20th Century Studios’ Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (which just crossed $144.3M).
The audience response to the Will Smith and Martin Lawrence reteam last night was 5 stars and 88% positive on Screen Engine/Comscore’s PostTrak, while the Rotten Tomatoes audience score is 97%.
The third film in the franchise, “Bad Boys for Life,” earned $6.4 million in Thursday previews in January 2020 after grossing $62 million in its opening weekend. It became the year’s highest-grossing film with $426 million worldwide after theaters closed during the pandemic.
Smith and Lawrence’s detectives Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett are back with another dangerous mission. This time they must exonerate their late police captain, who was posthumously accused of working with a drug cartel. The cast includes Vanessa Hudgens, Tiffany Haddish, Alexander Ludwig, DJ Khaled and others.
Also releasing this weekend is “The Watchers,” the directorial debut of M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan. The supernatural horror is expected to open with around $10 million.
When mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer cast Will Smith in a buddy-cop action film in 1995, he wasn’t quite an A-list movie star. He was still better known as the Fresh Prince than the king of summer blockbusters; compared to his co-star Martin Lawrence, who was a few years into his run hosting Def Comedy Jam and rocking his own popular sitcom Martin, Smith was arguably the bigger gamble in terms of keeping people in their seats.
Independence Day was more than a year away. But people immediately recognized that this young director from Philly could hold his own in Michael Bay’s world of fast cars, fast guns, quick cuts, and big explosions. He had a big personality to match the big-tentpole template. Plus, Smith and Lawrence had incredible chemistry. Of course Bad Boys was a huge hit. It was a sign of things to come.
