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 Disney and LucasFilm's ""Star Wars: The Last Jedi" retained
first place for the four-day New Year's holiday weekend despite
steep competition from Sony's "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle."
"Last Jedi" picked up an estimated $68.4 million, bringing its
domestic haul to $533.1 million.
Don't weep for "Jumanji," however. The fantasy reboot, which
finds Johnson, Jack Black, and Kevin Hart transported into a
video game world, has outperformed expectations, picking up a
lordly $66.5 million over the holiday weekend. It now has a
hefty $185.7 million domestic gross and should continue to draw
crowds in 2018. The "Jumanji" sequel has also done well
internationally, racking up $350 million worldwide, and has
provided a much-needed hit for a studio that has struggled to
keep pace with the Disney's and Warner Bros.'s of the world.
Sony claims the film has a $90 million budget. Those alleged
production costs have raised eyebrows around town as to their
veracity given the film's Hawaii location and starry cast, but
regardless of creative accounting and aggressive spinning, the
result is impressive. A sequel seems preordained.
"Star Wars: The Last Jedi" closed 2017 as the year's
highest-grossing release and the seventh highest-grossing
domestic movie of all time with $517.1 million. It will bypass
its fellow franchisee "Rogue One" at some point on New Year's
Day to take the seventh spot on the stateside charts and has
already blown past the $1 billion mark globally. The film
carries a $200 million price tag, and has generated controversy
for a series of creative decisions by director and writer Rian
Johnson that have, depending on your perspective, either infused
new energy into decades-old series or deviated dangerously from
the Jedi canon.
It's been a dismal year for the domestic box office, which ends
2017 with $11.12 billion in sales, down 2.3% from last year's
$11.38 billion and off slightly from 2015's $11.14 billion,
according to comScore. After a bruising summer, when revenues
plummeted more than 6% in the wake of costly flops such as "The
Mummy" and "Transformer: The Last Knight," the gap did narrow.
Fall and winter hits such as "It," "Thor: Ragnarok," "Coco," and
"Murder on the Orient Express," helped make up the difference.
The industry was also aided by record ticket prices.
Empirically, fewer people made it to the multiplexes. Attendance
is expected to hit a 27-year low when official numbers are
tallied.
Universal's "Pitch Perfect 3" took third place on the stateside
charts, grossing $22.7 million for the four-day period and
pushing its domestic total to just under $70 million. The a
Cappella comedy carries a $45 million production budget and has
been billed as the final installment in the franchise.
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Hugh Jackman's musical drama "The Greatest Showman" is finishing a
close fourth with $20.7 million. The Fox-Chernin Entertainment
production chronicles the rise of circus impresario P.T. Barnum. It
got a boost from the holidays, and showed the biggest gain in the
top 10 movies from the Christmas Eve weekend with an impressive 73%
surge. The domestic total should hit $54.3 million through Monday.
It's a pricey movie, though. All that singing and dancing didn't
come cheap and "The Greatest Showman" cost $84 million to make.
Fox's second weekend of "Ferdinand" rounded out the top five with
$14.6 million, giving the animated comedy $56.8 million
domestically.
Not every film was feeling the holiday spirit. Paramount's
"Downsizing" is a costly bomb. The comedy about a man (Matt Damon)
who shrinks to the size of thimble in order to live in a
materialistic utopia collapsed at the box office, eking out $6.1
million over the long weekend. Its total stands at $18.5 million --
a paltry result given its $65 million budget. It also prolongs a box
office losing streak for Damon. The actor also struck out with "Suburbicon"
and "The Great Wall," both of which opened during and flopped in
2017.
Warner Bros. and Alcon's comedy "Father Figures" was another
casualty of the Christmas crunch. The story of two twin brothers (Ed
Helms and Owen Wilson) on a quest to find their biological father
netted $5.1 million over the four-day weekend. Its total tops out at
$14.1 million, making it unlikely that it will recoup its $25
million production budget as well its marketing costs.
And Sony's "All the Money in the World" struggled to appeal to older
audiences. The drama about the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III
attracted lots of attention for the filmmakers' last minute decision
to re-cast a key role played by disgraced actor Kevin Spacey. The
breakneck reshoots took place in a matter of weeks, with Christopher
Plummer assuming the Spacey part as parsimonious billionaire J. Paul
Getty, and added $10 million to the film's $40 million budget. Alas,
audiences failed to show up. The movie grossed $7.5 million over the
holiday weekend, bringing its domestic total to $14.7 million.
Foreign audiences picked up the slack as domestic attendance
sputtered in 2017. The global box office is projected to hit $40
billion for the first time in history, propelled by the return of
China. Total ticket sales in the Middle Kingdom grew by 22.3%,
ending the year with $8.6 billion in revenues. That, at least, gives
a beleaguered movie business some cause for celebration.
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