'Jumanji' Stays on Top of the Box Office
by EG
The top spot at the box office over the MLK holiday weekend remained the same as last week's top finisher. Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle took the top spot, followed by The Post. Liam Neeson's The Commuter was the top new release, coming in a distant third.
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle maintained the top spot at the domestic box office for the second weekend in a row, corralling an estimated $35.4 million as the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend unfolded.
Steven Spielberg’s The Post posted solid numbers as it expanded nationwide into 2,819 theaters, while three other new nationwide openings had a tougher time making a mark.
And although Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which ranked fifth for the four-day weekend, is starting to wind down — it posted $15.3 million domestically for the holiday as it took another $19 million from 53 territories — with a cumulative worldwide haul of $1.269 billion, it has now surpassed both Disney’s own Beauty and the Beast ($1.264 billion) and Universal’s Fate of the Furious ($1.236 billion) to become the top global release of 2017 and the 10th top global release of all time.
Sony’s Jumanji, the comedy-adventure directed by Jake Kasdan and starring Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and Karen Gillan as the adult avatars of a magical game, took in $28.2 million for the three days before climbing to $35.4 million for the four-day holiday frame, which would bring its domestic cume to $291.6 million as it closes in on the $300 million mark.
Jumanji also was the weekend's top international grosser, grossing $81 million from 94 territories, as its worldwide gross climbed to nearly $675 million.
The Post, which recounts how Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) and editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) joined forces to defy the government and publish the Pentagon Papers, grossed $19.3 million for the three days as it headed to a four-day gross of an estimated $23.4 million. Since Fox opened the film on Dec. 22 in just a handful of theaters, the $50 million pic, from Amblin Entertainment and Participant Media, had collected $4.2 million in its limited release.
The politically charged, adult-skewing movie, which received an A CinemaScore, attracted an older audience (66 percent at 35 years old or above) as well as more females than males (55 percent versus 45 percent), and did best in the Northeast, West and Midwest, meeting with resistance only in the southern central portion of the country, which could allow it to settle in for an extended run.
Of the weekend’s three new wide releases, Lionsgate's The Commuter showed the most traction, with a third-place showing for the frame as it took in $13.7 million for the three days and a four-day total of $16.4 million. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra (The Shallows), the PG-13-rated action movie stars Liam Neeson as a businessman who gets caught up in a frenzied criminal conspiracy when he meets a stranger (Vera Farmiga) on a train. It received a B CinemaScore from an audience that was 54 percent male and 70 percent age 30 or older.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.
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