Weekend news roundup 20/11: World Champions, record breakers & more

Jonathan Victoria • 20 Nov 2023 News

Select news stories from the weekend across sports and entertainment.

Box Office update: Hunger Games wins the weekend

The latest instalment to the Hunger Games series has debuted at number one at the box office, fighting off Trolls Band Together and The Marvels to take the top spot.

Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes brought in $44m domestically, beating fellow debutant Trolls Band Together by just under $13m, with the Trolls sequel making $31.7m domestically.

Worldwide is a different story, though, as Trolls actually won out, earning $76.4m globally for a total of $108.1m. The new Hunger Games was unable to surpass the $100m globally mark, with their number sitting at $98.5m.

As for The Marvels, despite a third-place showing this weekend, it was another low for the MCU as the film mustered just $10.2m domestically - a drop of 78% on their opening weekend ticket sales, the worst second-week drop in MCU history.

Australia crowned Cricket World Champions

Australia broke the hearts of the entire nation of India when they comfortably beat the hosts to win the men’s Cricket World Cup title.

A solid bowling performance in the first session gave Australia strong hope when they came out to bat. Things started slow, with India getting three quick wickets, but once Travis Head and Marnus Labuschagne came in it was game over.

Head was the star, scoring a stellar 137 off of 120 deliveries, becoming just the sixth player to score a century in the men’s final.

Labuschagne also put up a respectable 58 not out from 110 balls to supplement his teammate's fantastic play.

For India, it was a devastating loss in front of their home fans. They didn’t do much wrong, it was just that Australia were simply at their best on the day. As a result of their win, Australia extend their record of World Cup titles, taking the number to six now.

Michael B. Jordan directing Creed 4

Michael B. Jordan has been revealed to be stepping into the directors chair again, once more in the Creed universe as he will be directing and starring in Creed 4.

His directorial debut was for the previous instalment of the franchise, Creed 3, which came out earlier this year. It was received fairly well by fans and critics and earned $275.3m globally at the box office, the most of the series so far.

Creed 4 was confirmed to be happening in March this year by Jordan himself. He also went on to describe how he wants to continue expanding the”Creed-verse”, potentially with more movies and spinoffs down the road.

Lukaku breaks Euros qualifying record

Romelu Lukaku helped Belgium ease past Azerbaijan in their Euros qualifying fixture, notching four goals in 20 first-half minutes.

His tally for the qualifying campaign now sits at 14, which is a new record for the stage. Previously the record for most goals in a European Championship qualifying stage campaign was 13, set by David Healy in 2008 and equalled by Robert Lewandowski in 2016.

Lukaku now stands on his own with the record, showing that he has still got the quality under the right setup. 

Dune: Part 2 release date bumped up

Dune: Part 2, the anticipated sequel to 2021s Dune, has been given a new release date, bringing the movie forward two weeks.

Warner Bros., the distributor behind the film, have never stated the reasons for the changes in release date, although the latest movements will have no doubt been due to the SAG-AFTRA strikes.

Their announcement of the movie being pushed up also came a couple days after Universal Pictures announced a delay in the upcoming Ryan Gosling flick The Fall Guy, leading many to think the move from Warner Bros. was to avoid competition for their film.

While it’s nice to see a movie being moved up instead of delayed, it should be noted that Dune: Part 2 was originally set to be released first on 20th October 2023 before being pushed back to 17th November, then pushed up to 3rd November only to then be delayed again until 15th March 2024, now finally landing on 1st March 2024.