Fueling box-office rebound, 'Quiet Place' opens with $58.5M

John Krasinski’s thriller sequel “A Quiet Place Part II” opened over the Memorial Day weekend to a pandemic-best $48.4 million, according to studio estimates Sunday

NEW YORK -- Moviegoing increasingly looks like it didn't die during the pandemic. It just went into hibernation. John Krasinski's thriller sequel “A Quiet Place Part II” opened over the Memorial Day weekend to a pandemic-best $48.4 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. Including the Monday holiday, the studio forecasts the film will gross $58.5 million in North America. The film's performance cheered a movie industry that has been punished and transformed by the pandemic. Paramount Pictures' “A Quiet Place Part II," which was on the cusp of opening in March 2021 before theaters shut, was the first big film this year — and one of the only larger budget COVID-era releases beside Christopher Nolan's “Tenet” — to open exclusively in theaters. Chris Aronson, distribution chief for Paramount, called the opening “an unqualified success.”