DEC 30, 2017 @ 10:20 AM21,677
Box Office: 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' Topping $1 Billion Today
Scott Mendelson , CONTRIBUTOR
I cover the film industry.
Remember how we all flipped out last weekend because Walt Disney's Star Wars: The Last Jedi took the biggest Fri-to-Fri drop in history for the second weekend of a Star Wars movie? Well, this is like that, but the opposite. Lucasfilm's The Last Jedi earned $19 million on its third Friday, a drop of just 23% from last Friday’s $24m day-eight gross. To wit, that’s a smaller “third Friday” drop than Force Awakens (-30%) and just slightly higher than Rogue One (-20%).
Be careful not to choke on your premature proclamations of failure...
Heck, among all Star Wars films to open straight into wide release (everything since Return of the Jedi, for which I can’t find day 17-day grosses but which dropped 30% in the third weekend), that 23% drop is smaller than Phantom Menace (-37%), Attack of the Clones (-58%) and Revenge of the Sith (-54%). Now all three of those were coming out of Memorial Day holiday weekends, but the percentages are the percentages.
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.So, no, Disney’s Star Wars franchise isn’t in any plausible peril. The film is doing obscene damage to theater cash registers even with potent competition, a bizarre media narrative focusing on dissatisfied fans (I’m half-expecting to see profiles of folks who hated The Last Jedi due to “economic anxiety”) and the fact that it’s the third Star Wars movie in three years. Even in a Netflix and Chill era, The Last Jedi is proving itself to be a forceful theatrical contender.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottme.../#1d2d346677e2