Box Office Week: Split surprises at #1 with a whopping $40.1 mil opening, the best original M. Night premiere since The Village, while xXX: The Return of Xander Cage opens to a solid $20 mil at #2. Also, Rogue One officially passed $1 bil worldwide this week.

Rank	Title	Domestic Gross (Weekend)	Worldwide Gross (Cume)	Week #
1	Split	$40,190,000	$45,990,000	1
2	xXx: The Return of Xander Cage	$20,000,000	$70,500,000	1
3	Hidden Figures	$16,250,000	$84,238,751	5
4	Sing	$9,036,530	$427,961,725	5
5	La La Land	$8,350,000	$173,380,497	7

Notable Box Office Stories:

• If The Visit was a trail run then Split is the confirmation that M Night Shyamalan is back in top form. Not only did the film receive the great reviews from his early career but it also approached the financial success as well, becoming the highest opening original film from him since The Village. Now I should note that The Last Airbender opened to $40.3 mil, but that was M Night's only adaptation and that was also a $150 big budget summer family blockbuster with the full weight of a studio behind it, so in my eyes this is the kind of traction we haven't seen for M Night himself since The Village. Many predictions had this opening in the low teens, but Thursday showings bumped that up to the mid-twenties and then had it maybe reaching $30 mil, but the final result blew everyone away. The film also scored a B+ which is pretty impressive for a horror/thriller. Remember last year's Don't Breathe got a B on Cinemascore and held on incredibly well. This is also another major success for Jason Blum, putting the opening on the level of the Paranormal Activity films for his company's best openings. The film only cost $10 mil, which reportedly M Night paid for upfront with his own money. If that's the case then M Night is about to see a huge chunk of this opening (minus cuts for Blum and probably the cast), which could easily equal or rival his once famed $20 mil a picture deal from his heyday. While there's a certain trajectory people are expecting M Night to go down now, it will be very interesting to see if he sticks with this model that allows him more freedom, less risk, and higher rewards or will go back to his insanely budgeted studio films in the future. Let's not forget this is a man who made a film that takes place entirely in a dumpy apartment complex that cost $70 mil. Either way Shyamalan has clearly repaired the damage he once had from mass audiences (I remember people opening laughing at his name in the Devil trailer) and what he does now as this comeback kid will be very interesting.

• No it's not 2007, there is indeed a new xXx film. The long delayed sequel finally came out and xXx: The Return of Xander Cage opened at #2 to a modest $20 mil. This is certainly not earth shattering for the franchise, but then again domestic expectations seemed low for two reasons. One is of course the release date. While the $85 mil budget isn't at the level of say The Fate of the Furious, it is more of a late summer release type film, so putting it in a time where we see say Hidden Figures and Sing holding on like crazy shows a clear understanding of explaining away a weak opening as bad placement. Second is the cast, which literally hits every single major market imaginable. Quite frankly you don't stack a cast with a Bollywood star, a K-Pop star, a Thai action star, a Chinese action star, a gay icon, a teen show star, an American football player, a Brazilian soccer star, and a cast member from Game of Thrones unless you want to hit every single quadrant and major foreign market known to man. And in that xXx 3 definitely succeeds as the film opened much better overseas to $50.5 mil including #1 premieres in India and Brazil with openings in China, South Korea, and Japan still upcoming. Furious 7 proved there's a big international market out there for multicultural casts so xXx is clearly couching the fact that this is a 12 year delayed sequel with a star that can directly market the film to every single major market out there and so far it's working pretty well. Clearly this won't be Furious 7 level big but I think already the film has shown a desire for these characters that could very well explode if a sequel is made much sooner than 2029.

• The last of the Oscar stragglers has opened, this time the Weinstein's much moved around McDonalds origin story The Founder which opened on 1,100 screens to a mediocre $3.7 mil at #9. Like Silence and Patriots Day this was clearly an Oscar hopeful that didn't get the buzz it wanted. However the life for The Founder was much stranger, initially coming out in August then being pushed back to late December in hopes of an Oscar nom for Michael Keaton. However I think the Weinsteins were surprised Lion ended up getting much more buzz than they expected so they shifted all the focus back onto that and left The Founder in the dust. I don't think The Founder with a wide release in August would have fared much better but certainly this poor strategy by the Weinsteins caused too much confusion about when the film was released that I imagine most people either forgot it existed or just didn't know it finally came out. Barring a surprise Oscar nom the film will likely be quickly shuttled out of cinemas.

• The Blumhouse model of quantity over quality was never truer than this weekend. While regular Blumhouse's splashier release Split did gangbusters, Blumhouse Tilt (a sub-label devoted to multi-platform releases) did its first foray into religious films with the underwhelming The Resurrection of Gavin Stone which opened on 850 theaters at #18 to a very weak $1.3 mil. The film was the first from Vertical Church Films which was expecting more along the lines of $3 mil for the opening. Quite frankly this is a weird fucking movie, distributed somehow by Blumhouse Tilt, WWE Films, and High Top Releasing. It's a film that was probably bought and sold and divided a million ways before even reaching the screen, and will likely make most of its money on VOD anyways. This is the real meat and potatoes of the Blumhouse model, small weird releases that make a pittance divided up to keep the company afloat that then profits when massive success like Split come along. I doubt this represents a new faith based film angle for Blumhouse but I also think Blum wonders if he can find out how to makes $2 mil turn into $60 mil like God's Not Dead.

• Disney proved yet again that there is a very high celling for Star Wars films as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story has now passed $1 bil worldwide. This makes it the 27th highest grossing film worldwide of all time and it could potentially pass The Dark Knight as the 6th highest grossing film domestically. As mentioned before the film has performed very similar to Finding Dory, with an almost 50/50 split between domestic and foreign with incredibly strong domestic legs and fine but not incredible foreign appeal. The film really lost a lot of ground in China where it's only made $54 mil (in comparison it's made $77 mil in the UK, a country with literally one billion less people in it). Still the film's foreign numbers are clearly not horrible and strong domestic hold of Rogue One is a feat, as now 4 of the top 10 highest grossing domestic films are now Star Wars movies. Clearly Disney can look upon this film as a success despite the hiccups it took to get to $1 bil.

Films Reddit Wants to Follow

This is a segment where we keep a weekly tally of currently showing films that aren't in the Top 5 that fellow redditors want updates on. If you'd like me to add a film to this chart, make a comment in this thread.

Title	Domestic Gross (Cume)	Worldwide Gross (Cume)	Budget	Week #
Your Name	N/A	$331,600,000	Unk	21
Moonlight	$15,826,127	$15,826,127	$5 mil	14
Doctor Strange	$231,490,380	$659,435,214	$165 mil	12
Arrival	$95,665,000	$163,159,006	$47 mil	11
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them	$231,277,992	$805,777,992	$180 mil	10
Moana	$236,784,702	$509,284,702	$150 mil	9
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story	$512,201,563	$1,011,301,563	$200 mil	6

Notable Film Closings

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Also you can see the archive of all Box Office Week posts at /r/moviesboxoffice.

Submitted January 23, 2017 at 11:40PM by mi-16evil http://ift.tt/2iWifJ7