Mufasa: The Lion King is showing its resilience at the US box office by sporting a 3.8% rise in its second weekend in theaters.

Mufasa: The Lion King managed to beat Sonic the Hedgehog 3 at the domestic box office on New Year’s Day. Mufasa: The Lion King, which serves as a prequel to the 2019 The Lion King movie, brought in an additional $10.

The box office race between Mufasa and Sonic highlights a promising 2025 for people who love going to the movies.

R-rated movie NOSFERTU made $40.3 million in its first five days, and A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, also rated R, made nearly three times less than MUFASA and SONIC in its first five days at $23.2 million.

Having staged something of a comeback during the Christmas week — a historically lucrative period at the box office — Disney’s Mufasa: The Lion King passed a couple of important milestones both domestically and worldwide this weekend.

The Lion King outperformed Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3 at the international box office, solidifying its global dominance. While both films competed strongly during the holiday season, Mufasa leveraged its international appeal to pull ahead of Sonic 3 in worldwide earnings.

Reflecting back on 2024, it was a notably up and down year for films at the box office. The labor battles of 2023 forced some major schedule changes that had a big impact, and there were some notable flops and down periods,

Led by a near-tie between two second weekend animated franchise films, then bolstered by two unusual wide Christmas day specialized-distributor releases, U.S./Canada theaters saw their best post-holiday grosses since 2019.

Elsewhere, Timothée Chalamet's Bob Dylan biopic 'A Complete Unknown' breaks records for Searchlight as vampire pic 'Nosferatu' bites off big business for Focus Features.

Two family films are dominating the holiday box office, with “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” winning the three-day weekend over “Mufasa” by a blue hair.