YOUR BOX OFFICE NUMBERS (from Box Office Mojo)
- Black Panther
- Peter Rabbit
- Fifty Shades Freed
- Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
- The 15:17 to Paris
The summer movie season starts in February now. As Marvel expands its reach, we’ve gone from one to two to three MCU films a year, and after six weekends of middling horror films, capstones to forgotten franchises, and reheated entertainments from 2017, America was ready for Black Panther.
Numbers are still coming in, but at the moment, Black Panther is only the fifth movie to open above $200M. It’s projected to take in at least $235M across the four-day weekend, and may also break the highest Sunday gross (anecdotally, my late Sunday showing was packed.) This looks to be the leading edge of a genuine phenomenon.
That didn’t leave much on the table for the other players. Fifty Shades Freed fell 55% in its second week, falling behind Peter Rabbit to third. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle hung on for its second week in fourth, but The Greatest Showman was finally knocked out of the top five, landing in sixth. Both movies posted respectable drops of about 20%, indicating that they still have a market.
Winchester and Maze Runner: The Death Cure weren’t so lucky. Both shed more than than a thousand theaters and over 55% of revenue. The 15:17 to Paris held its theaters in week two, but dropped almost 40%.
There were other new movies this week, but they didn’t fare much better than the old. PureFlix’s Christian film Samson opened at just under $2M in 11th. Early Man, an Aardman claymation film, which opened last month in its native UK, premiered here in seventh with $3.2M. Further down were a pair of Chinese films – Detective Chinatown 2 (#21) and Monster Hunt 2 (#29) – and further still, a swarm of movies I’ve never heard of, all opening on 50 screens or less. Perhaps audiences next week will have more love for Double Lover, The Party, Loveless, Nostalgia, The Boy Downstairs, Mind Game or The Wedding Party 2: Destination Dubai.