The Force Awakens Finishes Second at the Box Office for the Week
Via Forbes.com:
This is the weekend box office report for movies that weren’t new releases this weekend.
There is a little irony in The Revenant, a grueling and snowy survival story, topping the weekend box office in a frame distracted by a brutal snowstorm. The top movie of the weekend was easily The Revenant, which added 152 theaters and earned another $16 million in its third weekend of wide release. That’s a 45% drop from last weekend, which is impressive considering last weekend was a holiday and offered the post-Oscar nominations bump while this weekend had a giant snowstorm. And yes it’s always an achievement when a film tops the weekend box office after not opening on top in the first weekend of wide release, even if it’s often more about the competition.
The Leonardo DiCaprio survival adventure has thus far earned $119.2 million, passing the $116m total of The Wolf of Wall Street. Next up is the $128m gross of Shutter Island and the $132m gross of The Departed. The Big Short may end up winning Best Picture, but The Revenant is going to end up the second or third biggest grosser of the nominees this year. It won’t catch The Martian (now Matt Damon’s biggest domestic grosser just past the $227.4m total of The Bourne Ultimatum), but it has a shot at getting past Mad Max: Fury Road‘s $1153.6m total.
Not to be outdone, Walt Disney‘s Star Wars: The Force Awakens earned another $14.25 million, a drop of 44% from last weekend and bringing its cume to an absurd $879.29m domestic. That it’s still topping the three new releases and pretty much every holdover film is beyond impressive, and yeah if not for the strength of The Revenant it’d probably have been at the top again this weekend.
It’ll probably top $900 million domestic over the next two weeks. It has earned a ridiculous $1.940 billion worldwide as of today, including $1.06b overseas alone. It will lose at least some of its IMAX screens to The Finest Hours next weekend and will probably lose even more of its 3D and PLF screens to The Finest Hours and Kung Fu Panda 3 on Friday, so if you want to see it “big” one last time, do it sometime between now and Thursday night.
