‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ continues to raise the bar on box office performance, with the largest second weekend in history, with a $153.5 million haul, bringing its domestic gross to $544M. This coupled with the $546M it has taken in overseas makes this the fastest film ever to hit $1 billion!
‘The Force Awakens’ should continue to dominate, as it isn’t facing much major competition. This week, newcomers ‘Daddy’s Home’ starring Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell and ‘Joy’ with Jennifer Lawrence edged their way into the top five, but ‘Daddy’s Home”s $38.8M at #2 is a steep drop from ‘The Force Awakens” $153.5M. Both new movies, however, did better than they were projected to.
Last week’s #2 and #3 releases, ‘Alvin & The Chipmunks: The Road Chip’ and ‘Sisters’, respectively, held up fairly well during the Christmas holiday weekend. The two movies flip-flopped, with ‘Sisters’ hanging strong at #4, while ‘Alvin’ took #5. In an unusual occurrence, ‘Sisters’ actually did BETTER this weekend, taking in $13.9M versus its debut gross of $13.4M.
Here are the official numbers:
- Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Disney) $153.5 million
- Daddy’s Home (Paramount) $38.8 million
- Joy (20th Century Fox) $17.5 million
- Sisters (Universal) $13.9 million
- Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip (20th Century Fox) $12.7 million
Opening strongly in limited release, both Academy Award hopeful ‘The Revenant’ and Quentin Tarantino’s latest ‘The Hateful Eight’ performed very strongly. ‘The Hateful Eight’ opens wide next weekend and is expected to potentially land at #2. Without the ‘Force-ful’ competition, it may have made it to #1. ‘The Hateful Eight’ opened only on 70MM IMAX in 100 theaters, yet still managed to reach #10, which is quite impressive. One caveat is that earlier this year, two films, ‘Everest’ and ‘Steve Jobs’ also opened well in limited release and generated great reviews and audience reaction, but both fizzled upon going wide. A third film, ‘The Walk’ followed the same strategy, but didn’t do well even in limited IMAX release.
The Will Smith drama ‘Concussion’ had a modest opening at #6 with $11M, the lowest wide release of Smith’s career, but the weighty flick, which may generate Oscar buzz for the leading man, was not projected to be a huge smash. So this opening is along the lines of what was expected.
The remake of ‘Point Break’, which had a $100M budget, fizzled, only taking in $10.2M. It has done fairly well in foreign markets, so it may make up its budget that way.
‘The Hateful Eight’ is essentially the only major release arriving next week– New Year’s weekend, a notoriously low box office period. ‘The Revenant’ opens wide the following weekend (January 8) along with the buzzy suspense thriller ‘The Forest’. It is possible that ‘Star Wars’ will start to wind down by then, giving these newcomers a better chance to lure audiences, but with many already hitting up encore screenings of ‘The Force Awakens’, this behemoth may continue to stomp like an AT-AT well into the New Year.
Check back next week to see how things shake up!
Source: IGN
