Box Office Week - On MLK weekend Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is #1 again on its fourth week with $35.4M, The Post expands well to #1 with $23.4M , The Commuter opens solid at #3 with $16.3M, Paddington 2 opens weak at #6 with $15M, and Proud Mary opens poorly at #8 with $12M.

Rank	Title	Domestic Gross (Weekend)	Worldwide Gross (Cume)	Week #
1	Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle	$35,425,000	$674,560,909	4
2	The Post	$23,400,000	$27,889,237	4
3	The Commuter	$16,375,000	$19,709,997	1
4	The Greatest Showman	$15,600,000	$198,473,366	4
5	Star Wars: The Last Jedi	$15,282,000	$1,268,956,584	5

*all numbers are for four-day weekend

Notable Box Office Stories:

• Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle - It's truly remarkable just how powerful the box office run for Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has been as the film was #1 for the second weekend in a row with $35.4M for the four-day weekend. While The Last Jedi fell to #5, Jumanji held on with another incredible drop of just 24.5% and that's on it's fourth week of release. The film is now the highest grossing Christmas week release of all time with $291M domestic, surpassing the previous record holder Meet the Fockers ($279M). The film also opened in China this week where it scored an excellent #1 debut with $40M. Already the film has passed the domestic and worldwide gross of more expensive films like Justice League and Kong: Skull Island and domestically is now not only going to pass $300M but could threaten 2017 placement's of major films like Thor: Ragnarok, IT, and Spider-man: Homecoming. Jumanji was just a perfectly timed film, a decently reviewed adventure film with great appeal to kids and adult bored by the usual crap-fest of January release. Jedi proved too dark, divisive, and long to be the film of the season and Jumanji swooped in and stole that extra $200M+ right out from under it. It's a remarkably sane achievement from a company that's not been the best at decision making, but Sony really knocked one of the park here.

• The Post - While The Post has struggled to become the establishment choice for Best Picture like many expected, it still seems to be doing just fine without all those statues as the film expanded to wide release this week ending the four-day weekend at #2 with $23.4M. The film had fantastic per theater averages in its first 3 weeks of limited release but time and time again we've seen these films bomb when reaching outside of the coasts. However never count out how much power that the first on-screen pairing of Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep can hold, nor the power of a much older than Jumanji form of nostalgia. As expected the film played older, with 2/3rds of the audience over the age of 35. The film also scored a fantastic A rating on Cinemascore. With that in mind expect this film to have incredible legs no matter how much it gets shut out of the academy or not. Spielberg's recent run of historical films have done fantastic multipliers, with a 5.5x multiplier for War Horse and 8.6x multiplier for Lincoln. It's very likely that the $50M film that was written, shot, editing, and scored in less than a year will reach $100M domestic, especially in a very dull cinema time with a very active president who is currently trying to censor a notable negative book about his presidency. Often awards matter for how an awards friendly film does at the box office, but like with most things Spielberg it really doesn't matter what the Academy thinks.

• The Commuter - Remember September of last year when Liam Neeson was "retired" from action movies for like two weeks then decided nah, gonna keep doing it? Well The Commuter is a good example of why Neeson is still doing this, margins! The film opened to #3 with $16.3M which is on the low end for Neeson but with a budget of just $30M it doesn't really matter. The film comes from long time Neeson collaborator Jaume Collet-Serra which marks the fourth action film they've made together and besides Run all Night (which cost $50M) all of them made solid earnings. Audiences may be a little bored of the Neeson thriller roles but not enough that it disrupts the margins, especially on Redbox and VOD where action thrillers live and breathe. Hopefully this year sees Neeson moving into something new, namely with Hard Powder which has the best premise ever (a snowplow driver seeks revenge against the drug dealers he thinks killed his son) but is actually a comedy and seems like something of a parody of the kinds of movies Neeson has done for almost a decade at this point. Still margins are margins and this one just squeaked by so it's not likely Neeson will stop making action thrillers any time soon.

• Paddington 2 - Reviews don't always equal great openings and it certainly didn't help Paddington 2 which despite becoming just the fourth movie to get 100% on Rotten Tomatoes with 100 reviews opened at #6 with $15M for the four-day weekend. There's a couple factors at play here for why this lauded film didn't catch on. Most obvious is that Paddington was always more of a British property than American, as evidenced by the fact the film has earned over $54M in the UK. However that didn't stop the original Paddington from opening $8M higher than 2 and earning a lifetime domestic gross of $76M. Another other issue is that frankly kids just aren't seeing it. The film played to an audience of 55% over the age of 25, pretty high numbers for a kid's film. Jumanji being such a beast is eating up all the family time so likely only really young kids went to see Paddington 2. Finally and perhaps most importantly Paddington 2 was originally going to be released by The Weinstein Company but they had to sell it off for bankruptcy reasons which should be totally obvious. That didn't really give new owners Warner Bros. much time to advertise with most of its press coming just this week for the Rotten Tomatoes score. However don't count out the cute bear just yet. Paddington had horendous marketing but word of mouth was strong and the film had a great multiplier and potentially all the news about the RT milestone will reach the key parent's ears. However even if Paddington 2 drops off the film still has earned $150M worldwide thanks in large part to UK audiences and it's earned a surprising 3 BAFTA nominations. I think Very Nice Bear 3 is pretty much confirmed.

• Proud Mary - It seems we may have a new trend of notable female actresses having their own hitman movies, because after the success of Atomic Blonde we have two major ones in 2018. The first one out of the gate is Proud Mary starring Taraji P. Henson which did not start off this new trend well opening at #8 with $12M for the four-day weekend. Despite having a pretty great poster and trailer the film certainly felt like a bomb coming into the weekend when the embargo for reviews wasn't lifted until the day of release and then got a terrible 24% on Rotten Tomatoes when it did lift. Audience reviews were kinder with a B+ on Cinemascore but it doesn't help that 77% of the audience was over the age of 25. Films starring black leads are generally very good at maintaining but the problem is everyone's attention was set far more on the much bigger black action movie this year, Black Panther, which out sold Proud Mary in pre-sales when tickets went up this weekend. Proud Mary had good marketing but was shuffled into a a weekend with 4 wide releases and given no time to build hype. We'll see how the next one of these films Red Sparrow does (which has already been marketed to hell and is still two months away) but it's not looking like the female led hitman genre is going to be a mainstay.

• Oscar Movie Round-up - While obviously The Post was the major Oscar player winner this week others tried to capitalize on the weird time in between Golden Globes wins and Oscar nominations, the latter of which usually give the biggest box office boost. First up is I,Tonya which added 261 theaters for a total of 550+ theaters earning $4.2M for the four-day weekend. The film has been on the lower end of the awards talk with the only major competition in Supporting Actress but this film seems to be thriving on good word of mouth and nostalgic value. Next up is The Shape of Water which was the only other drama besides Three Billboards to take home more than one Globe, most importantly the Best Director award for Guillermo del Toro who now seems the frontrunner for the Oscar. The film actually lost 81 theaters this weekend but still gained over last earning $3.6M for the four-day weekend. With a potential to have the most nominations for a 2017 film (thanks technical awards) the film seems to be bidding its time for a possible post nomination theater surge. The film that took the fullest advantage of the Globes push was the big winner of the night Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri which won four including Best Drama. That film added 700 theaters putting its total count back over 1,000 yet notably it made less than Shape in more theaters earning $3.2M for the four-day. Finally there's Lady Bird the winner of Best Comedy at the Globes which added 90 theaters and came in with $2M for the four day. It will be interesting to see in two weekends what happens when films get to really feel that nomination bump (nominations happen on January 23rd).

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 #
Thor: Ragnarok	$313,101,320	$850,914,163	$180M	11
Justice League	$227,205,943	$654,405,943	$300M	9
Coco	$198,216,440	$623,416,440	$175M	8

Notable Film Closings

Title	Domestic Gross	Worldwide Gross	Budget
Geostorm	$33,700,160	$210,000,160	$120M
A Bad Moms Christmas	$72,110,659	$129,581,838	$28M

As always /r/boxoffice is a great place to share links and other conversations about box office news.

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

Submitted January 16, 2018 at 11:29PM by mi-16evil http://ift.tt/2DB5A5j