The updated estimates for Walt Disney's Star Wars: The Last Jedi show a $12.073 million (a 49% drop) over its fifth Fri-Sun weekend and $15.282m over the Fri-Mon MLK weekend. That brings the film's 32-day domestic total to $595.556m in North America. So, yeah, the movie made about $592m in its first full month of domestic play. That still makes it the second-fastest grossing movie of all time between Jurassic World ($592.8m after 32 days) and The Force Awakens ($858.9m after 32 days). Its fifth-weekend drop compares negatively to The Force Awakens (-37% for a $26m Fri-Sun fifth weekend) and Rogue One (-39% for a $13.4m Fri-Sun fifth weekend). And, yeah, this is the week where it starts to fall behind Jurassic World in day-to-day cumes, so we'll see if it can get to $600m before day 36 (Friday) to still be the second-fastest movie to cross that milestone.
There will be discussions, maybe months (if not years) of discussions, as to whether Star Wars: The Last Jedi merely acted like a "part 2" Star Wars film (with an over/under 30% domestic drop), whether it really was affected by mixed word of mouth among the hardcore fans or whether Sony's Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and 20th Century Fox's Greatest Showman just overperformed. I'd argue it was probably a bit of "all of the above," with the caveat that we also don't know if Jumanji's astonishing run (biggest Christmas week release in history, about to be Sony's biggest domestic release sans Spider-Man ever, etc.) hurt The Last Jedi more than the reaction to The Last Jedi helped Jumanji be more than just this year's Sing/Tomorrow Never Dies.
Disney's rivals offered real competition this time around, perhaps merely to prove that they could, and The Last Jedi wasn't lucky enough to be the only game in town this time. Heck, even Coco turned out to be stronger than The Good Dinosaur, especially overseas and especially in China, and Wonder lived up to its title while the flurry of kid-friendly holiday releases (Ferdinand, Jumanji, Greatest Showman, Pitch Perfect 3, Paddington 2 etc.) grossed a combined (as of Sunday) $558.3m. Hell, throw in Coco and Wonder and you've got $882.4m in non-Last Jedi kid pics sucking up family dollars over the last two months, and that's not counting Justice League and Thor which both made around $10m over the last five weeks.
By the way, you can wring your hands all you want about The Last Jedi's entirely expected collapse in China, but I would argue that Coco's record-crushing $189 million China gross more than makes up for it on a macro-level. That's another reminder that Disney (like pretty much every studio worth their salt) is more than just one or two big IPs and that their overall fate doesn't reside in how well the new Star Wars movie performs.
Even if you want to concede that a Last Jedi under $650 million domestic and $1.4 billion worldwide (which thus will be a lot less protifable than the $2.068b-grossing The Force Awakens) is a quantitative disappointment, we should also then note that Thor: Ragnarok ($850m) and Beauty and the Beast ($1.263b) overperformed and that Black Panther may well set the world on fire (in a good way) in 30 days. This is doubly true if the goal is market share. Conversely, I will argue that the relative failure of WB's Justice League was mitigated by the obscene $700 million+ worldwide performance of New Line's It and that Universal's Dark Universe fumble is made less problematic by their Blumhouse triumphs.
It's not a 1-to-1 situation, but it shows the value of not putting all of your eggs in one basket. Moreover, it's something to consider when we discuss the overall health of the big studios. But we're going to have to find a way to discuss these somewhat new situations where we get sequels to obscenely successful predecessors that shouldn't be expected to play on the same level.
No, I'm not expecting Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom to make anywhere near the $1.6 billion earned by Jurassic World, if only because there isn't as potent of a hook ("The park is open!") this time out. And assuming Universal spent over/under $180 million to produce it, that's okay. Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again! is no more likely to equal the $609m gross of Mamma Mia! than was My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 expected to match the $350m+ worldwide cume of the 2002 sleeper smash. And what exactly is a realistic figure for Wonder Woman 2 or Frozen 2 or James Bond 25 in late 2019, or Avatar 2 in late 2020? But that's a question for another day.
