Everyone knew ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ would open huge and smash records, but it keeps rolling. It already scored the best Monday gross ever with $40.1M domestically, plus $41.7M internationally. Now in its second Friday, which happened to be Christmas Day, the film took in $49.3M domestically which is more than twice that generated by the previous Christmas champ, 2009’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’.
‘The Force Awakens’ has already raked in $440M in the U.S. and $449.9M overseas, bringing the film’s total to $890.3M worldwide. Current predictions state that the film will hit $1 billion by the end of the weekend… the fastest film to ever do so! This also pushes Disney’s gross for the year to $2 billion, adding to contributions from ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Inside Out’ and ‘Ant-Man’ among others.
Should ‘Star Wars’ hold out through the weekend– and there’s no logical reason why it wouldn’t– it will score the biggest second weekend on record. Like with its opening weekend, this pushes it past ‘Jurassic World’ which took in $106M in its sophomore weekend.
Driven by ‘Star Wars’, the U.S. Christmas box office breezed past $100M for the first time ever, with estimations that the weekend will top $300M.
Not everyone is forcing themselves to see ‘The Force Awakens’. What else are folks checking out at the Cineplex? It looks like the Will Farrell/Mark Wahlberg comedy ‘Daddy’s Home’ will land at #2, having taken in about $17M, including Thursday night previews. The Jennifer Lawrence/David O. Russell collaboration ‘Joy’ took in $6.9M on Friday and looks to come in with around $21M for the weekend, placing it at #3, despite lackluster reviews. ‘Sisters’ had the audacity to open last weekend against ‘The Force Awakens’ and this slice of counterprogramming is still doing pretty well and should come in at #4, with Will Smith’s drama ‘Concussion’ taking the #5 spot. Also opening in limited release and doing well are ‘The Revenant’ and ‘The Hateful Eight’. Flopping is the remake of ‘Point Break’, but it may do well enough in Asian markets to keep it from being a total loss.
Check back Monday for the final weekend numbers. For now, are you impressed by just how well ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ is doing? Or did you know it would do this spectacularly all along?
Source: Comic Book Resources
