Weekend box office: Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens with more than $200 million
When The Force Awakens opened up in 2015, it was fun to see how much money the film was going to make after a long hiatus from the series. That film opened with about $247 million at the weekend box office and shattered records. It’s not so exciting now because we all know every subsequent film in the trilogy is going to come close to that. STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI (click the link to read our review) is on pace for around $220 million, but that number could go up or down depending on how numbers shake out over Sunday. With the good word of mouth and people anxious to avoid spoilers, I could definitely see the number going up on Sunday. The other new movie of the weekend was the animated FERDINAND, which gave a good effort but was only able to bring in about $12 million.
STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI will obviously win the next few weekends since even a 50% drop will be more than $100 million. But it will have some competition in the form of Hugh Jackman’s THE GREATEST SHOWMAN, Anna Kendrick’s PITCH PERFECT 3 and Dwayne Johnson’s JUMANJI remake. All three films should do fine, but I doubt any of them will come within $50 million of Star Wars. PITCH PERFECT 3 is the one to keep an eye on since it’s banking on some serious counter marketing to the rest of the new films. In terms of awards hopefuls, there’s Alexander Payne’s DOWNSIZING, which I found severely disappointing. We also get the made-for-awards THE POST, with Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep and rounding out the list of new movies is the comedy FATHER FIGURES, and Christian Bale’s HOSTILES. So there’s a lot of new choices next weekend, but it’s still going to be about Star Wars. Note: the numbers below will be updated as they become final.
1. Star Wars: The Last Jedi $221m
2. Ferdinand $12m
3. Coco $9.2m
4. Wonder $5m
5. Justice League $3.9m
6. Daddy’s Home 2 $3.3m
7. Thor: Ragnarok $2.8m
8. The Disaster Artist $2.4m
9. Murder on the Orient Express $2.3m
10. Lady Bird $1.9m
(Deadline)
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