https://www.forbes.com/sites/robcain.../#6f5cba9618d8
The Last Jedi's Gargantuan $151M 2nd Weekend Plunge Is An Epic Hollywood Choke
The scale of the catastrophe that is Star Wars: The Last Jedi is difficult to comprehend without comparing it to major, historic natural disasters. Because no other movie has come anywhere close to the picture’s $151.5 million 2nd weekend box office razing, there’s no movie comparison that gives its record-obliterating failure proper context.
To begin to appreciate the epic nature of the Last Jedi catastrophe, consider the 9.2 magnitude megathrust 1964 Good Friday earthquake near Anchorage, Alaska. That was such a massive catastrophe that it killed Oregonians and Californians more than 1,000 miles away.
It may seem odd to compare a movie that has earned nearly $400 million in domestic box office receipts to such a giant calamity, but that total represents a tremendous shortfall relative to expectations. The important numbers to look at are the measures of the movie’s collapse. That $400 million looks good only if we ignore the results of every previous Star Wars movie. But a closer look at the numbers reveals what a debacle The Last Jedi truly is.
It’s not just the movie’s 69 percent 2nd weekend plunge that underscores its troubles. True, it’s an enormous decline, but a dozen other big-budgeted, heavily marketed studio tent-pole movies (out of the thousands Hollywood has produced) have seen similarly sized percentage declines. They include Fifty Shades of Grey, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and three of the Twilight movies.
It’s more the absolute number, the $151.5 million plunge from its $220 million debut to its $68.5 million second weekend, that staggers the imagination. Only a handful of movies—The Last Jedi, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, and Batman v Superman among them, have ever shed $100 million or more in box office totals from one weekend to the next.
But even the 2nd biggest collapse, that of the Harry Potter film, paled in comparison to The Last Jedi, falling than 25 percent short of Episode VIII’s fiasco.