“The Boss Baby” Remains on Top for Another Week, While “Smurfs” Sequel Flounders
0Film | Weekend | Opening Weekend | Current Gross | |
The Boss Baby | $26.3m | $50.1m | $89.4m | |
Beauty and the Beast | $23.6m | $174.7m | $430.9m | |
Smurfs: The Lost Village | $13.2m | $13.2m | $13.2m | |
Going in Style | $11.9m | $11.9m | $11.9m | |
Ghost in the Shell | $7.3m | $18.6m | $31.5m |
As predicted, newcomer films Smurfs: The Lost Village and Going in Style were not able to top The Boss Baby or Beauty and the Beast‘s winning streak, but where the former struggled under the pressure, the latter rose above expectations. Overall, the weekend was only slightly below that of the same weekend last year and after March was able to perform 4.7 percent stronger than March of last year, 2017 is leveling itself out following a rather tepid start to the year.
Over the weekend, The Boss Baby and Beauty and the Beast opened as expected — in the mid-20s — and helped them along as some of the most successful films of the year so far, the latter especially. But before we get there, The Boss Baby hit $200 million worldwide over the weekend and officially became the 27th highest-grossing DreamWorks Animation film and is poised to break into the top 25. Currently, 1998’s The Prince of Egypt holds the 25th spot with $101 million, but that will be a cakewalk for Boss Baby to overtake. As the goalposts continue to move, all eyes are on just how well Boss Baby will be able to do — for example, can it beat Kung Fu Panda 3‘s $143 million to break into the top 20? It very well could. After all, it took 25 weeks for Kung Fu Panda 3 to reach that domestic total and Boss Baby is already performing better comparatively.
Beauty and the Beast, now more than double the #2 film of the year (Logan, at $218 million), wasn’t able to crack $1 billion this past weekend but give it one more weekend and it will. It’s right on the precipice at $976 million and given it’s managed to stay under a 50 percent drop week-to-week since it opened and its strong performance in foreign markets (from which it added $36 million over the weekend), Disney will very soon have something big to celebrate, and certainly not for the first time (nor, likely, the only time this year).
It’s not as though Smurfs: The Lost Village, the third installment in Sony’s Smurfs franchise and the first entirely animated film of the bunch, completely failed. It only opened a million or two less than where predictions placed its opening, but in the grand scheme of things — compared to other recent animated films, its chances of getting yet another sequel — it wasn’t a particularly strong first weekend. It was the lowest opening of the franchise but it also has the lowest budget, which helps matters. Internationally, the film has made $42 million and that will be its saving grace and its profit. This film won’t stick around in either people’s memories or the box office top five for very long so it’s probably best to simply move on now.
Where Smurfs performed decently, if not great, Going in Style, the remake of 1979 film starring Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Arkin, surpassed expectations by a few million. It was able to crack $10 million and make a little less than $12 million, which, for a film with a $25 million budget and a limited audience, is more than decent. It received an overall B+ CinemaScore from audiences and from the film’s target demographic of movie-goers 50 and over, it received an A-. Still, just because it opened better than expected doesn’t always mean much. For this film to turn a profit, it’ll have to prove that it has legs to go for at least a couple more weeks and with some relatively big titles opening in the coming weeks, that may be difficult.
Finally, Ghost in the Shell, perhaps not surprisingly, opened slightly less than expected at just a little over $7 million, marking a more than 60 percent drop from its first to its second weekend. Globally, the film is at $124 million, proving just how crucial its box office intake outside of the domestic market is, but it will still need to do better to make a decent profit on its $150 million budget. As it stands now, the film is carving out a rather disappointing path for itself, which should please its ardent critics.
Meanwhile, smaller newcomers made decent dents in their limited releases. Faith-based film The Case for Christ made just under $4 million in 1,174 theaters, the Chris Evans-led film Gifted made $446,380 in 56 theaters, Colossal made $120,226 in 4 theaters, and the period film Their Finest, which was been receiving excellent reviews, made just over $76,000 in 4 theaters.
(Source: boxoffice.com, boxofficemojo.com. Figures represent numbers at time of writing, and may have changed.)
Anya Crittenton | Associate Editor