Battle at the Box Office 12/30
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker remained at the top of the box office for the final weekend of 2019.
Rise of Skywalker pulled in another $72.4 million, dropping just shy of 60% from last weekend’s opening. It is currently at $362.2 million for two weeks out domestically and it is outpacing The Last Jedi by about $6 million in the same time frame. The Last Jedi had a much steeper second-weekend drop as well. Worldwide, The Rise of Skywalker has just over $725 million. It’s currently the seventh highest-grossing film domestically of 2019 and the 14th highest-grossing film worldwide.
Jumanji: The Next Level and Frozen II came in second and third place respectively and each of them actually increased their box office from last weekend, most likely due to increased traffic as families headed out to theaters during and after Christmas. Jumanji currently has just over $471 million worldwide while Frozen II has $1.2 billion and is the third highest-grossing film of 2019 worldwide and the third-highest animated movie of all time.
Little Women opened to fourth place well above expectations with $29.2 million for its five days out, having come out on Christmas Day last week. Sony was projecting $16-17 million for the five days. It’s well above Greta Gerwig’s last directorial effort, Ladybird, although that movie had a very slow rollout and peaked at 1,557 theaters.
Spies in Disguise rounded out the top 5 with $22.2 million for its first five days out. It’s one of the lowest openings for Blue Sky Studios, falling behind even 2017’s Ferdinand but word of mouth seems to be strong with an A- Cinemascore and there’s really no new animated film competition in the next few weeks, so it could develop some legs and hold on, especially if people are sick of Frozen II.
Uncut Gems opened wide and moved into seventh place with $9.5 million. It’s one of the best 5-day openings ever for A24 but it may suffer from word of mouth, as the wide release audience gave it a C+ and it has a 54% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, indicating people are not getting the movie they were expecting.
Cats continues to be an epic disaster further down the list. It only made another $4.8 million and $17 million total so far two weeks out. Analysts are predicting that Universal could lose $100 million on the movie.
The Per Theater average went to 1917, which opened in 11 theaters to qualify for the Oscars. The World War I film took in $52,383 in each theater for the weekend.