Box Office Breakdown: Everybody Act Surprised, 'Rogue One: A Star Wars Story' Outperforms Expectations
Throughout the year, Disney has been trying to underplay the box office expectations for their spin-off in a galaxy far far away. After all, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is the first Star Wars movie to follow the insane record-breaking success of The Force Awakens ($249 million opening weekend, and $936 million domestic total). Obviously, this movie was never going to come close to The Force Awakens. That film rode a wave of pent-up demand (ten years since the previous Star Wars movie) and nostalgia for the original cast that won't even be replicated with next year's Episode VIII.
Disney's uber-conservative opening weekend figures of $120 to $130 million were total low-balls, though, overtly designed to temper expectations. And a large portion of the entertainment press fell for it. Early tracking predicted about a mid-$130 million debut, and even after the massive $29 million Thursday preview numbers rolled in, some outlets were still predicting as low as $140 million. Now that the film ended up breaking $155 million for the weekend, becoming the second highest December opening of all time and the third highest weekend of the year, Disney changed the conversation from how much lower the film grossed compared to The Force Awakens to how much better the movie did than everyone thought.
The brand is strong with this one, and Rogue One basically proves that Star Wars will put people in seats despite pre-holiday stress, generally terrible weather, and even bad buzz from the rumored massive re-shoots earlier this year. With an "A" Cinemascore across all demographics and above average professional reviews (still holding strong at 84% positive on Rotten Tomatoes with almost 300 reviews), the film will likely have strong staying power in the coming weeks despite some perceived heavy competition coming from three big wide releases next week. Assassin's Creed arguably represents Rogue One's biggest demographic competition, but there is little to no chance that it or Passengers will hurt it that much in the long run. Look for an extremely robust 50% drop for Rogue One next weekend, and an easy repeat at number one.
A few other notes:
- Sadly, the idea of Will Smith as the biggest movie star on the planet seems to be a thing of the past. His new-agey drama Collateral Beauty under-performed compared to even the modest $10-12 million expectations of the studio with $7 million, and it's extremely telling that his biggest hit in a long time, Suicide Squad, was sold more on the film's quirky ensemble of characters than on Smith's fading star power. RIP Big Willy Style.
- Moana stayed strong in second place, but its nearly unchallenged four-week reign over the children's movie market will inevitably end when Sing is released on Wednesday.
- Arrival's ongoing success story continues with some good news this weekend as it holds on despite Rogue One. If its pattern holds, it will probably end up with just over $90 million domestic, which is pretty great for the modestly budgeted hard sci-fi flick.
- Two inevitable Best Picture nominees, Manchester by the Sea and La La Land, battled it out for the fifth and sixth spots this week with Manchester pulling ahead by a hair. However, La La Land is the real winner here since it is only playing in just 200 theaters nationwide compared to the Manchester's 1008. Both are performing great for small awards-bait indie films, though.
Check out the full three day estimated top ten:*
1. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - $155 million
2. Moana - $11.6 million
3. Office Christmas Party - $8.4 million
4. Collateral Beauty - $7 million
5. Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them - $5 million
6. Manchester by the Sea - $4.1 million
7. La La Land - $4 million
8. Arrival - $2.7 million
9. Doctor Strange - $2 million
10. Nocturnal Animals - $1.3 million
Wide-releases coming next week (Wednesday 12/21/2016): Assassin's Creed, Passengers, Sing
*Box office stats courtesy of boxofficemojo.com.
