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UPDATE! Box Office Weekend – ‘Solo’ Shoots First, but Struggles; ‘Deadpool’ Takes a Dip, and ‘Avengers’ Reaches Franchise High

by · May 29, 2018

Box Office

Welcome to another iteration of Box Office Weekend, and the first one that coincides with a holiday weekend. This Memorial Day Weekend continues the general box office trend of the holiday being less of a moviegoing event as Solo: A Star Wars Story, the only new game in town, sadly underperformed, and last week’s Deadpool 2 fell more than expected.

 

This piece has been updated with official numbers from their respective studios.

 

In spite of favorable reviews and generally-positive responses from audiences, Solo: A Star Wars Story just barely managed to squeeze past $100M over the course of four days, a not-great opening for a movie that had its budget swell to $250M or more due to extensive reshoots as the result of a troubled production. (The spin-off was originally meant to be made for $125M; a $100M+ opening wouldn’t be spectacular by Star Wars standards, but it would be more than enough to ensure that the film would have a profitable run. The overspending indicates, to me, that the company would rather put more resources to correct a “problem” movie than to release an unsatisfactory product as-is and attempt to cash in on the Star Wars name – something that I think is a good initiative, even if it’s not the most profitable one.) The bright side is that this is still either the seventh-biggest Memorial Day Weekend ever, but sadly, the movie didn’t do all that well overseas, either. While Lucasfilm’s first three movies since its acquisition have generated more than enough profit to make up for this film’s potential loss, it’s clear that the company is going to have to use a different strategy than simply banking on the Star Wars name to sell the spin-offs. Hopefully, good word-of-mouth both domestically and abroad should help bolster this movie’s numbers, as there’s not a whole lot of competition for the next few weeks.

 

It’s not all bad news for Disney, though. Solo could afford to be a flop, considering that it’s not their big event tentpole this Summer; Avengers: Infinity War is. That movie has now established itself as the best-performing movie in the Avengers series on the domestic front a while after it became the biggest movie in the franchise overseas, making $627.6M in one day and one month. It’s also the second-best performer on a domestic scale, trailing Black Panther. While that movie isn’t on the Top Twelve this weekend, it’s about a weekend or two away from crossing the $700M line domestically, a benchmark which it’s looking like the still-wildly-successful Avengers won’t be able to reach. But ultimately, Avengers will have the bigger profit for Marvel Studios, as the movie has now crossed $1.9B globally in just over a month. The movie may just become the fourth film in history to reach $2B before the end of its record-shattering Summer run, depending on how it holds domestically and internationally in the weeks leading up to the release of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (something that happens much sooner overseas than it does domestically, depending on what part of the world you live in).

 

Meanwhile, future Disney acquisition Fox had their only big movie of the Summer take a stumble this weekend with a pretty big drop of over 65% for the three-day period and a not-great 57% drop over the four-day period. A big reason for this drop, aside from there being a little less interest in the Deadpool sequel as the original movie (as the opening weekend numbers indicated), is due to Solo‘s arrival. The Millennium Falcon-based movie not only snatched away all of the premium-format screens, but it also gave the sequel something the original movie didn’t have to worry about: competition. As such, the sequel is understandably less leggy than the first film, but it still isn’t going to have any trouble making a profit. (Seriously, though: I still have to wonder what Fox were thinking when putting their biggest film of the year a week before Star Wars was a good idea, even for a Star Wars movie that was much less of an event than any of the three films that preceded it. Also questionable: releasing an R-rated superhero movie on the heels of a soon-to-be-former competitor’s PG-13 superhero movie that’s still making a fortune at the box office.)

 

The Top Twelve for the three-day weekend can be summarized as follows (bolded titles are new releases):

  1. Solo: A Star Wars Story (Disney/Lucasfilm) – $84.42M Total.
  2. Deadpool 2 (20th Century Fox) – $43.463M Weekend/$208.17M Total; 65.4% Drop.
  3. Avengers: Infinity War (Disney/Marvel Studios) – $17.294M Weekend/$622.489M Total; 41.3% Drop.
  4. Book Club (Paramount Pictures) – $10.071M Weekend/$32.279M Total; 25.8% Drop.
  5. Life of the Party (Warner Bros./New Line) – $5.379M Weekend/$39.364M Total; 29.3% Drop.
  6. Breaking In (Universal) – $4.284M Weekend/$35.872M Total; 37.2% Drop.
  7. Show Dogs (Global Road) – $3.267M Weekend/$10.861M Total; 45.8% Drop.
  8. Overboard (Lionsgate/Pantelion Films) – $3.133M Weekend/$41.627M Total; 32.3% Drop.
  9. A Quiet Place (Paramount Pictures) – $2.435M Weekend/$180.133M Total; 38.3% Drop.
  10. RBG (Magnolia Pictures) – $1.288M Weekend/$5.902M Total; 2.8% Rise.
  11. Rampage (Warner Bros./New Line Cinema) – $0.844M Weekend/$93.939M Total; 46.5% Drop.
  12. Super Troopers 2 (20th Century Fox/Fox Searchlight) – $0.612M Weekend/$29.912M Total; 52.7% Drop.

The Top Twelve for the four-day weekend can be summarized as follows (bolded titles are new releases):

  1. Solo: A Star Wars Story (Disney/Lucasfilm) – $103.016M Total.
  2. Deadpool 2 (20th Century Fox) – $53.83M Weekend/$218.537M Total; 57.1% Drop.
  3. Avengers: Infinity War (Disney/Marvel Studios) – $22.454M Weekend/$627.649M Total; 23.8% Drop.
  4. Book Club (Paramount Pictures) – $13.121M Weekend/$35.329M Total; 3.4% Drop.
  5. Life of the Party (Warner Bros./New Line) – $6.875M Weekend/$40.86M Total; 9.6% Drop.
  6. Breaking In (Universal) – $5.5M Weekend/$37.089M Total; 19.4% Drop.
  7. Show Dogs (Global Road) – $4.33M Weekend/$11.925M Total; 28.1% Drop.
  8. Overboard (Lionsgate/Pantelion Films) – $4.138M Weekend/$42.632M Total; 10.5% Drop.
  9. A Quiet Place (Paramount Pictures) – $3.132M Weekend/$180.830M Total; 20.6% Drop.
  10. RBG (Magnolia Pictures) – $1.726M Weekend/$6.242M Total; 37.8% Rise.
  11. Rampage (Warner Bros./New Line Cinema) – $1.097M Weekend/$94.192M Total; 30.4% Drop.
  12. Super Troopers 2 (20th Century Fox/Fox Searchlight) – $0.653M Weekend/$29.954M Total; 49.5% Drop.

Avengers: Infinity War, Deadpool 2, and Solo: A Star Wars Story are now playing in theaters.

 

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