Ride-Along-2 (2)

As was expected, ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ has cooled at the box office, but then it’s been out for a month.  It brought in $25.1 million, which will bring its domestic total to $856.9M after Monday which counts as part of the weekend due to Martin Luther King Day.  (It’s projected to add an extra $5M to the weekend total.)

‘The Force’ currently sits at $1.012 billion internationally, the fifth highest gross ever, just shy of ‘Furious 7’ with $1.16B and ‘Jurassic World”s $1.7B, ranking fifth overall.  (James Cameron behemoths ‘Avatar’ and ‘Titanic’ are still sitting pretty in the #1 and #2 spots, respectively.)

‘Star Wars’ was expected to fall to the Ice Cube/Kevin Hart comedy sequel ‘Ride Along 2’, but it actually slipped to #3 as ‘The Revenant’ following its wins at the Golden Globes and domination of the Academy Awards nominations, jumped to #2.

Here are the official numbers:

  1. Ride Along 2 (Universal) – $34M
  2. The Revenant (20th Century Fox) – $29.5M
  3. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Disney) – $25.12M
  4. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (Paramount) – $16M
  5. Daddy’s Home (Paramount) – $9.3M

‘Ride Along 2”s $34M was a great opening and enough to take the top spot, but it was shy of the first movie’s $41.5M opening.  ‘Ride Along 2’ is expected to take in an extra $5M on Monday, bringing it to a $39M total for the four-day weekend.  Unfortunately, comedy sequels can go one of two ways.  If they top their preceding films, they tend to have stronger runs, but the fact that this one fell short would seem to indicate that it won’t have legs, as most fans of the first will have flocked to the opening weekend.  (See ‘Horrible Bosses 2’, ‘Anchorman 2’, ‘Ted 2’ etc.)

‘The Revenant’ won Best Picture, Drama and star Leonardo DiCaprio won Best Actor, Drama at the Golden Globes last weekend and then scored twelve nominations for the Academy Awards, sending audiences flocking to theaters to check out what all the fuss was about.

At #4 is this week’s third new release entry, Michael Bay’s ’13 Hours’.  With a budget of $50M, this one doesn’t have to be a huge hit, but with an opening weekend of just $16M, it may have trouble making that back.  But of course, Bay’s typical movies make a bajillion dollars each, so the sting shouldn’t be too harsh, especially since this was a much lower key affair sans giant robots.  (Still a lot of explosions, though.)

The biggest opening next weekend should be the raunchy Robert De Niro/Zac Efron comedy ‘Dirty Grandpa’.  Whether it can outperform ‘Ride Along 2’ is unclear, however.  Two lower key genre releases may also perform fairly well.  Cloë Grace Moretz stars in alien invasion thriller ‘The 5th Wave’, while ‘The Walking Dead”s Lauren Cohan stars in scary doll horror flick ‘The Boy’.  Will these entries scare up big business as ‘Star Wars’ winds down?  Check back next week to see!

Source: Box Office Mojo