Box Office: 'Death on the Nile' besting 'Marry Me' in quiet Super Bowl weekend showdown

There's a battle between love and "Death" this weekend at the domestic box office, as the Jennifer Lopez rom-com "Marry Me" and Kenneth Branagh's follow-up to his 2017 whodunit "Murder on the Orient Express" both attempt to lure older audiences back to movie theaters in their openings. "Death on the Nile" looks to bow at No. 1 with a muted $12.8 million from 3,912 locations, while "Marry Me" will follow with an expected $8 million intake.

Disney and 20th Century Studios' "Death on the Nile," based on the famous Agatha Christie novel, took in $5.1 million on Friday, an underwhelming tally. That's only half as much as the opening day gross of its predecessor "Murder on the Orient Express" ($10.7 million), which eventually legged it out to a $102 million domestic gross. While Gal Gadot's character Linnet Ridgeway-Doyle may have enough champagne to fill the Nile in the film, it seems dubious that the whodunit could sell enough tickets to fill the $90 million hole left by its production budget.