[Movies] 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' Falls To 2nd Place On Friday

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'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' Falls To 2nd Place On Friday, Still Topping $800M
from Forbes



Star Wars: The Force Awakens may or may not win the weekend box office in its fourth frame of release. But for one night it's the second place film, which says more about the over-performance of Leonardo DiCaprio's The Revenant than anything to do with Star Wars. The Walt Disney sci-fi blockbuster earned $10.76m yesterday, down a not-unreasonable 67% from last Friday (which was New Year's Day). That's a drop similar to Lord of the Rings: Return of the King on its fourth Friday. This gives J.J. Abrams's sequel a $781.14m domestic total, with the film passing $800m either today or at worst tomorrow.

Yes it fell to second place last night since The Revenant earned around $14.5 million yesterday, and that film should end the frame with a 2.625x weekend multiplier for a $38m weekend. The various Lord of the Rings and James Cameron December smashes had 3.8x weekend multipliers in their fourth respective weekends, so The Force Awakens should get to around $41m for the frame. If it doesn't quite make it to $50.3m for the weekend, and at this point it presumably won't, it will have to settle for the second best "frame four" of all time. Obviously if The Revenant over-performs and The Force Awakens doesn't quite fly as high on Saturday/Sunday, then yeah the DiCaprio film may yet top the weekend.

Obviously this is all trivia, but it shows that the film is going to play here on out more like a Lord of the Rings film (presumably minus major Oscar attention, but we'll see) versus the likes of Titanic and Avatar. For the record, Star Wars may make in its fourth weekend what Avatar made in its fifth weekend.  The big news will came from China, where it debuted with a whopping $32.1 million, the third biggest opening day for an import.

Obviously, that's the second biggest movie market and it will be interesting to see to what extent Chinese audiences respond or care about what was arguably a distinctly American myth. Let's just say very few moviegoers in China are going to well up when Han Solo enters the Millenium Falcon and intones "Chewie, we're home!" I only bring this up to remind everyone that we shouldn't panic if the film merely does "really well" in China and not perhaps Furious 7/Monster Hunt well.

Of course, the last time I urged caution for the box office fortunes of a Star Wars movie... well, you know how that went. To be fair, my "optimistic" box office prediction from back in September turned out to be pretty accurate, if only by accident. And moreover, I didn't see any of the people swearing that it would to $300m domestic/$600m worldwide apologizing.

The film crossed $1.6 billion today worldwide and will likely end the weekend with a total over the $1.669b gross of Jurassic World, putting it number 3 on the all-time list for global box office. A strong performance in China will both possibly vault it over Titanic ($2.186b) worldwide and over Furious 7 ($1.162b) overseas to make the film the second biggest movie ever worldwide, the third-biggest movie ever overseas, and the top grosser of all time in America.

It's interesting that there will be such a difference in those rankings. That the film arguably over-performed in America is not a problem presuming foreign audiences liked what they saw in what for some of them was their first real exposure to Star Wars in a movie theater.  And that's enough Star Wars domestic news for one day. Check back tomorrow to see how quickly it topped $800m and/or if it topped Jurassic World globally.