'F9' opens with the biggest U.S. box office since 2019, a huge win for theaters

I told you at the end of May that F9: The Fast Saga's U.S. release would be a major test for the "post"-pandemic box office. Well, it was exactly that, with theater proprietors and Universal Pictures looking like the big winners.

F9 posted an estimated $70 million at the U.S. box office during its opening weekend, starting Friday, June 25. Just to set the scene a bit more clearly, F9's earnings in the U.S. marks Hollywood's biggest opening weekend box office since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker opened in Dec. 2019.

Obviously, the pandemic has everything to do with the amount of time that's passed between then and now. For most of 2020, the theater industry was effectively shut down as the need for social distancing and avoiding crowded indoor spaces became clear.

Bad Boys for Life was 2020's top earner in the U.S., with a box office gross of just over $200 million. It opened in mid-January, which gave it a head-start on Sonic the Hedgehog, Birds of Prey, and the handful of others that hit actual theaters before most of the country shut down in March.

For context: The top five highest-grossing movies of 2019 all made more than $400 million. The year's winner, Avengers: Endgame, came close to $1 billion. The last time Hollywood's top release of the year earned less than $300 million, it was 2001.

Admittedly, F9 opened a bit lower than you'd expect for a mainline Fast/Furious movie. The Fate of the Furious, released in 2017, took in almost $100 million during its opening weekend. Furious 7, released in 2015, fell just short of $150 million. (Hobbs & Shaw, from 2019, opened with just $60 million, but it's also a spinoff.)

But you can't factor out the pandemic here, and $70 million is nothing to dismiss For all intents and purposes, F9 is crushing it. Theaters needed the boost, too. People are still feeling out how and when they'll re-embrace life in public, and a big turnout like this is bound to encourage more people to get out for movies (or whatever else).

This is huge for Universal too, though, make no mistake. Don't forget: F9 was a victim of COVID in its own way. The movie was originally supposed to hit theaters on May 22, 2020. That obviously didn't happen, but where other studios and Hollywood interests explored streaming or other options for getting their 2020 movies out, Universal simply locked F9 up in the vault for a post-pandemic release.

So while some of the biggest releases for summer 2021 — I'm looking at examples like In the Heights, Black Widow, and Jungle Cruise — will be available to stream day-and-date with their upcoming (or just-passed, in the case of Heights) theatrical releases, F9 is a singular example. It's a massive blockbuster that you can't stream; if you want to see it, you've got to plan a trip to the movies.

It's not so much a loss for those other movies or the studios behind them as it is a win for Universal. There's plenty of incentive for Disney and HBO to use their upcoming blockbusters as a selling point for their respective, and still fairly new, streaming platforms. But Universal still ends up looking savvy here; F9 is proving that its patience with holding back big releases may well be rewarded.