Weekend box office: Justice League struggles to hit $100 million
There’s a singular moment when virtually everyone knew that JUSTICE LEAGUE (click the link to read our review) was going to be a failure. That moment came when the dust had settled on BATMAN V SUPERMAN and Warner Bros. quietly announced that Zach Snyder and the entire creative team was going to return to direct JUSTICE LEAGUE. It seemed WB hadn’t learned their lesson or didn’t care to correct the ship and so everything played out exactly like we expected; Snyder and company presumably delivered the movie we expected and WB ended up throwing a hail Mary and somehow got Joss Whedon in to try and fix the mess. Since you can’t fix an entire movie with reshoots, WB was left distributing a hodgepodge of a film that was doomed to fail. And now, on its opening weekend, everyone is talking about how disappointing a less than $100 million opening at the weekend box office is for a blockbuster event movie. Inevitably, the comparisons will be made to Marvel and that’s when things get extra embarrassing for WB. To put it in perspective, Marvel’s least successful core Avenger, Thor, managed to open up with $119 million with its third film just three weeks ago. So now it’s time to try and guess what WB is going to do next and your guess is as good as mine. The smart move is to scrap everything but Wonder Woman and try to start over, but that’s a plan that will take over a decade to pay off. But I’m not sure their current universe is even capable of recovering, outside of Wonder Woman. JUSTICE LEAGUE wasn’t the only movie opening this weekend. The sob fest WONDER (click the link to read our review) managed to open with close to $30 million, which is very impressive since it opened against JUSTICE LEAGUE.
Next week sees the release of Disney Pixar’s COCO and I think that COCO is going to pour salt on JUSTICE LEAGUE’s wounds. My guess is that COCO is going to open with MOANA-like numbers in the $50-$60 million range and that should be enough to take the top spot from JUSTICE LEAGUE. Aside from COCO, the rest of the new films are Oscar chasers like THE DARKEST HOUR and CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. Note: the numbers below will be updated as they become final.
1. Justice League $93.5m
2. Wonder $27.3m
3. Thor: Ragnarok $21m
4. Murder on the Orient Express $14.3m
5. Daddy’s Home 2 $13.5m
6. The Star $9.1m
7. A Bad Mom’s Christmas $7.3m
8. Lady Bird $2.4m
9. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri $1m
10. Jigsaw $1m
(Deadline)
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