'Quiet Place' makes US box office noise as COVID-19 curbs ease

Horror film A Quiet Place: Part II opened in North America this weekend to considerable fanfare and with numbers unlike any seen since the pandemic began, as COVID-19 curbs began falling and theatres began filling up again. After Hollywood's brutal year of dark screens and empty seats, final box office figures for the long weekend out Tuesday showed that movies are starting to come back. "The symbolic importance of this Memorial Day Weekend to the movie theatre industry cannot be overstated," said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior analyst at Comscore. The numbers, he said, "tell an indisputable story about the resilience and continued relevance of the big-screen experience". The latest Quiet Place – a John Krasinski-directed sequel to the popular 2018 film about a young family trying to outwit horrific blind monsters with frighteningly keen hearing – took in $57.1 million for the four-day Memorial Day weekend, industry watcher Exhibitor Relations reported Tuesday. That pushed the combined gross for the weekend's top 12 films to $97.5 million, up from $18.8 million the previous weekend and from a flat-lining zero in the corresponding 2020 weekend. "This bodes well for the future of...