Battle at the Box Office 2/12
Three new releases at the box office caused some shuffling for the whole top 10 and Fifty Shades Freed pushed Jumanji out of the top spot after it’s epic early 2018 run.
Fifty Shades Freed took in $38.8 million, down $8 million from Fifty Shades Darker but the franchise has now made *shudder* over $1 billion worldwide. The audience reaction was about the same as Darker although the ratio between female and male viewers was the highest ever for the trilogy in favor of women, as they made up 75% of its audience.
Peter Rabbit came in second place for its opening weekend with $25 million, which tops both of Paddington’s domestic debuts but it may not have the same pull outside the US (it seems like Peter Rabbit hasn’t opened anywhere besides the US as of right now) and especially in the UK, who love Paddington the way China loved Warcraft.
The last new release for the weekend, The 15:17 Train to Paris, took third place with $12.6 million, which is the sixth best opening for Clint Eastwood as a director between Jersey Boys and J. Edgar but nowhere close to his other “real life heroes” movie, Sully, which made $35 million its opening weekend and, granted, had Tom Hanks and not heroic but comparatively unknown non-actors.
The reigning champ of late 2017/early 2018 fell to fourth place this weekend as Jumanji took in another $9.8 million. The movie is now the fifth highest grossing film both domestically and worldwide for 2017, with over $365 and $881 million respectively and will probably top Spider-Man 2 and become Sony’s second highest grossing film of all time.
The Greatest Showman rounded out the top 5 with another $6.4 million, another weekend with a less than 20% drop, and its now made over $146 million domestically.
Elsewhere on the charts, Winchester took a bit of tumble in its second weekend, going from third to seventh with $5 million and its made $17 million so far. The aforementioned Paddington 2, perhaps thanks to direct competition with Peter Rabbit and losing almost 1,000 theaters, fell out of the top 10 in a pretty big way, going from tenth to 18th with $1.2 million. 12 Strong and Den of Thieves both also dropped out of the top 10 and The Post and The Shape of Water remain the two Oscar contenders that are in the top 10.
All of this is kind of moot though as Black Panther is going to thoroughly destroy everything else this coming weekend and has already broken box office records via it’s pre-sale tickets.