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tomatometer:

75% Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

88% The Post

56% The Commuter

33% Insidious: The Last Key

55% The Greatest Showman
-

100% Paddington 2

23% Proud Mary

metacritic:

*click pic(s) for source*

‘Jumanji’ Dominates MLK Weekend, ‘The Post’ Leads Newcomers

Sony’s “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” is dominating the North American box office to easily win the four-day Martin Luther King Jr. weekend with about $33.4 million at 3,849 sites, estimates showed Sunday.

Fox’s “The Post” is leading the rest of the pack handily and topped forecasts with $22.2 million at 2,819 locations for Friday-Monday after expanding from 36 sites. The opening of Lionsgate’s Liam Neeson’s thriller “The Commuter” also topped expectations in third place with $16 million at 2,892 venues.

The fifth weekend of Disney-Lucasfilm’s “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” with $14.7 million at 3,090 sites is fourth and Fox’s fourth weekend of “The Greatest Showman” with $14.5 million at 2,938 screens takes fifth place at the holiday box office.

Warner. Bros.’ launch of family comedy “Paddington 2” was battling for sixth place with Universal’s second weekend of “Insidious: The Last Chapter” with about $14.1 million each. Sony’s launch of action-thriller “Proud Mary” came in eighth with $12 million at 2,125 sites followed by Universal’s fourth weekend of “Pitch Perfect” with $6.7 million at 2,505 sites and Focus Features’ eighth weekend of “Darkest Hour” with $5.7 million at 1,693 venues.

Overall business was solid rather than spectacular with a four-day total in the $190 million range, according to comScore. “Jumanj: Welcome to the Jungle,” which will finish the holiday with nearly $290 million in 29 days, now ranks as the eighth highest grosser released in 2017.

“‘Jumanji’ has in essence hit the reset button and is now behaving more like a film in its second weekend rather than its fourth,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst with comScore. “In the wake of a startling late run ascension to the number one spot, ‘Jumanji’ continues to energize the early 2018 box office marketplace while this weekend taking on a host of wide release newcomers.”

Disney noted Sunday that “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” had reached a worldwide total of $1.264 billion, topping Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” ($1.263 billion) and Universal’s “The Fate of the Furious” ($1.236 billion) to become the top global release of 2017 and the tenth-highest global release of all time.

“Jumanji,” starring Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart, provided the most substantive challenge to “The Last Jedi” after opening Dec. 20. It’s the most successful title for Sony since “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” which pulled in $337 million domestically during the summer.

“The Post,” starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in a story about the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers, attracted an older audience with 66% over 35. It received an A Cinemascore with ComScore’s PostTrak audience survey showing solid response with 63% rating the drama a “definite recommend” — indicating strong playability in coming weeks, according to Chris Aronson, president of domestic distribution.

“We see a real opportunity for attracting young people who are politically aware due to the timeliness of the subject matter,” he added.

The National Board of Review named “The Post” the best film of 2017 with Hanks and Streep winning the acting awards and the Producers Guild nominated it as one of its top 11 films but it was denied nominations last week from the Directors Guild and Writers Guild. “The Post” has an 88% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

“The Commuter,” starring Neeson as a businessman drawn into a criminal conspiracy on his train ride home. The film finished Friday with around $4.6 million, and has received a B CinemaScore.and a 55% Rotten Tomatoes rating. The film kicks off a long-term partnership between Lionsgate and StudioCanal that will continue with “Early Man” and “Shaun the Sheep Movie 2.”

*click pic for full list/source*


*click pic for full list/source*

 

[Kadayi]

Disney noted Sunday that “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” had reached a worldwide total of $1.264 billion, topping Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” ($1.263 billion) and Universal’s “The Fate of the Furious” ($1.236 billion) to become the top global release of 2017 and the tenth-highest global release of all time.

*chortles*

Gotta love the Disney PR painting it as a win.

 

[Gold_Loot]

Just a month ago, if you would have told me that Jumanji was pushing 300k and Star Wars was going to drop like a wet rock, I would have thought you were crazy. Yet, here we are.

 

[Grizzlyjin]

*chortles*

Gotta love the Disney PR painting it as a win.

It's the 10th highest grossing movie of all time...6th highest domestically, and #1 of 2017.

 

[hikarutilmitt]

*chortles*

Gotta love the Disney PR painting it as a win.

I'm not seeing how making that much money is a lose but okay!

Or is this still doomsday prophecy about how it's losing money week over week because fanboys have their undies bunched about it?

 

[Kadayi]

Doing considerably less well than its predecessor is hardly a positive.

 

[Grizzlyjin]

But the drop is in line with second entries for Star Wars movies. Now if the third film does less than Last Jedi, sound the alarm. But they're not touching Force Awakens...well maybe ever, not with yearly releases.

Solo not making $1B would probably be disappointing, but I'd imagine they've tempered expectations to fit more of a Marvel model. Where the big ones clear a billion easily and the smaller films finish in the 600-700 range.

Kinda like how there is almost no way that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom comes close to Jurassic World. Doesn't mean it's a failure per se, you just can't recapture that kinda domestic run easily.

 

[Lupingosei]

Solo not making $1B would probably be disappointing, but I'd imagine they've tempered expectations to fit more of a Marvel model. Where the big ones clear a billion easily and the smaller films finish in the 600-700 range.

Solo already costs 300 million now and they are still doing reshoots. Even if they would only spend 100 million on marketing 700 million would mean, they would have made no money with the Solo movie. This movie is so expensive it has to make more than a billion to at least salvage a little bit of all that burned money.

 

[Kadayi]

But the drop is in line with second entries for Star Wars movies. Now if the third film does less than Last Jedi, sound the alarm. But they're not touching Force Awakens...well maybe ever, not with yearly releases.

Pretty sure you said the same thing in the previous thread as if somehow it's commonly accepted that sequels do worst than their predecessors. I'm not quite sure that's the case, or that much precedent can be drawn from the previous films given we are talking a good decade past at this juncture.

 

[Grizzlyjin]

Pretty sure you said the same thing in the previous thread as if somehow it's commonly accepted that sequels do worst than their predecessors. I'm not quite sure that's the case, or that much precedent can be drawn from the previous films given we are talking a good decade past at this juncture.

It's not somehow commonly accepted, it's literally the truth for the franchise. Not once but twice. I mean we don't have to wait long to see if the pattern holds. If Episode 9 outgrosses The Last Jedi, it would be a third time. The grosses for first entries in Star Wars films are so lopsided when they happen that it goes beyond what happens with normal franchises. When you start talking $2 Billion international and almost $1 Billion domestically, that's phenomenon territory. There isn't room to grow from that in just 2 years. That's why I mentioned Jurassic World because we'll probably see a similar dropoff with that franchise.

Sequels should grow, like how The Kingsman: Golden Circle basically just did what the first one did. But that's a franchise that obviously had plenty of room to get bigger. You can't grow on $2 Billion box office total, especially not in 2 years. Maybe if they took another decade off.

I'd say the foreign market, even though its never been super jazzed about Star Wars, not getting any growth would be a concern. Because if the bottom falls out in domestic interest, they don't have anything. We don't have to wait very long to see if The Last Jedi actually did any true damage. If they take another dip with their finale...yeah...I'd say they need to retool some things.

 

[CampbellzSoup]

Doing considerably less well than its predecessor is hardly a positive.

What are you trying to prove ...give it up man

 

[Kadayi]

Sequels should grow, like how The Kingsman: Golden Circle basically just did what the first one did. But that's a franchise that obviously had plenty of room to get bigger. You can't grow on $2 Billion box office total, especially not in 2 years. Maybe if they took another decade off.

No ones talking about growing it, but one would expect it to be comparable, which it isn't. Clearly, the audience reception wasn't great, and word of mouth and lack of repeat views has had a notable impact. To handwave that away and imply the BO is somehow par for the course for the 2nd film because with SW the second film 'traditionally' underperformed (based on frankly archaic datasets at this juncture) is a denial of the realities of how poorly the film has been received by audiences. People ponied up, but they didn't go back for seconds. That is not a good look for a SW film.

Will Disney strike out with the final episode? I think it's going be an extremely tough sell for them to win people back and based on where they left off and with Carrie Fisher unfortunately out of the picture it's hard to see how they can turn it around into a triumph, and personally, I'm not convinced Abrams possesses the necessary talent to pull it off.

What are you trying to prove ...give it up man

What's to prove? People voted with their wallets and chose not to give Disney more than the requisite. Against others that might seem great, but against themselves not so much. Disney has a whole heap of merch they are hoping people would want to buy off of this, that is simply going to sit on store shelves until it hits clearance.

 

[luxsol]

Or is this still doomsday prophecy about how it's losing money week over week because fanboys have their undies bunched about it?

I think some people are just focusing on the day to day drop in sales, kinda ignoring the part that it still made over a billion, thinking Disney is spinning it for not acknowledging the drops.

On the other side, we have people saying history repeats itself, despite the fact that a lot of modern movies do bigger than their predecessors.
Personally, i'd say that TFA couldn't have been beat, considering the negative reaction. I mean, i thought it was superior mediocre, but i still watched TLJ hoping they'd do something better. Obvoiusly they didnt and it killed all my interest in this trilogy. And you can definitely see a lot of other people thought it was really bad too, hence bad word of mouth and the large drop in ticket sales.
Without that huge opening of hopeful fans, TLJ wouldn't be as successful as it is.

 

[Raziel]

Is TLJ drop really in line with AOTC drop?

Don’t see how that would be good considering one is 90% on RT and the other is.. AOTC.

 

[Hissing Sid]

Yeah I reckon a whole lot of peeps took the bait and found their arses parked in a cinema seat before they realised they’d been had.

Not everyone sits on the internet jaw jawing about Star Wars.

Probably helps that the professerrrr *Gags*, The professionerrrrrr..... *Takes deep breath* ...... the professional film critics, shamelessly slobbered all over the thing.

Only Disney and Lucasfilm know wether it measured up to their internal expectations or not. And those conversations will be being had behind closed doors.

For the present they’re just gonna flash the ‘Billion’, word around and give it some friends called ‘Hunky and Dory’ to keep it company.

Will TLJ poison the Star Wars well?

Too early to tell I reckon.

They can’t be happy with the bad word of mouth though. And that shits only gonna grow with time.

The future will be interesting.

 

[hikarutilmitt]

I like how people who dislike something are so quick to mock professional critics and then if the critics agree it's "well of course they liked it it's great!" I swear some of them would have a bumper sticker saying how much TLJ sucked and that critics are buffoons if they could.

This is like the most in-your-face example of opinions being like ass holes.

 

[Hissing Sid]

I like how people who dislike something are so quick to mock professional critics and then if the critics agree it's "well of course they liked it it's great!" I swear some of them would have a bumper sticker saying how much TLJ sucked and that critics are buffoons if they could.

This is like the most in-your-face example of opinions being like ass holes.

I haven’t given a shit about critics opinions for years, good or bad. As far as I’m concerned they’re just an opinion with a bigger thesaurus.

Nope, I just found the discrepancy between the professionerrrrrr *gulp*, the professionerrrrr..... the critics score and the audience score to be interesting.

And I’m sure it helped sway some casuals into paying for a seat.

 

[hikarutilmitt]

I haven’t given a shit about critics opinions for years, good or bad. As far as I’m concerned they’re just an opinion with a bigger thesaurus.

Nope, I just found the discrepancy between the professionerrrrrr *gulp*, the professionerrrrr..... the critics score and the audience score to be interesting.

And I’m sure it helped sway some casuals into paying for a seat.

Your words, in fact posting like this, say otherwise.

Also, really, casuals would go anyway because even if you're not a fan, but you go to movies, you'll still go see the new big shiny because it's the new big shiny.
It happens with Marvel movies.
It happened with LOTR.
It happens with Terminator (yep).
It will happen if we get more Matrix movies.
It happens with The Fast and the Furious.

Thing is, these movies also tend to be entertaining in varying ways to varying people. Critics aren't the end-all-be-all of ratings, but taking a larger account of armchair critics as a gauge to go see a new movie would be folly (particularly these days with how stupid people are on the 'net).

 

[Hissing Sid]

Your words, in fact posting like this, say otherwise.

Also, really, casuals would go anyway because even if you're not a fan, but you go to movies, you'll still go see the new big shiny because it's the new big shiny.
It happens with Marvel movies.
It happened with LOTR.
It happens with Terminator (yep).
It will happen if we get more Matrix movies.
It happens with The Fast and the Furious.

Thing is, these movies also tend to be entertaining in varying ways to varying people. Critics aren't the end-all-be-all of ratings, but taking a larger account of armchair critics as a gauge to go see a new movie would be folly (particularly these days with how stupid people are on the 'net).

What does any of what you have written here have to do with anything that I’ve said?

I don’t care for critics full stop. No matter what medium they use. No matter the subject they critique. Hence the language. Nothing to do with Star Wars in particular. I just don’t dig talking heads. Any fool can talk a good game.

Once again, my interest in the critics angle for this particular movie is all about the discrepancy between their views and that of the audience.

 

[hikarutilmitt]

And the audience has clearly spoken by not going to see the movie in droves.

Oh wait!

 

[Kadayi]

I think the differential between Critic and Fan reaction comes down to a distinction between what each is looking for. Film critics are looking for well-directed fare and in that regard, TLJ delivers (thus the high scores). Fans on the other hand, many of whom are heavily invested in the overarching storyline are looking at narrative and in that respect, TLJ failed to deliver and seemingly undermined a lot of what had happened before. For a similar case scenario consider the disjunction between Critic and Fan reviews of Mass Effect 3. For Fans story is of fundamental importance, whereas for your average critic, as long as it hits a benchmark of being entertaining, that's generally sufficient. They're somewhat less likely to go hard unless they're already super invested in the franchise narrative. About the only professional review, I've seen where someone absolutely trashes the film is this critic from Entertainment Canada who is a huge SW fan (needless to say spoilers): -

 

[Hissing Sid]

And the audience has clearly spoken by not going to see the movie in droves.

Oh wait!

I never suggested otherwise.

I already stated that we’d have to wait and see to find out wether or not TLJ’s negative fan reaction has had negative consequences for the franchise.

I was merely wondering if Internally Disney/Lucas are happy with droves. Or were they expecting DROVES?

Like I said, who knows. I don’t. But then neither do you.

 

[hikarutilmitt]

My question about the fan reaction is how much of it is _actually_ a ton of upset fans or just that the upset ones are the loudest, since that is almost always what happens with strong emotions. It might just be noise. Hell, I know people in my office, all but maybe a single digit number liked it and those who didn't stated the exact same reasons I'm seeing in places like this, so it's hard to tell if it's actually their opinion or a borrowed one. It could _also_ be bandwagoning.

I mean, I worked support for 10 years and going by that you would think the product(s) I was supporting never worked or were somehow terrible, but I showed the other reps who thought that the numbers of what we see as issues versus the actual users/devices and the percentage is incredibly low.

 

[luxsol]

And the audience has clearly spoken by not going to see the movie in droves.

Only for the first days.
You can definitely see that word of mouth made people stay away after the audience started talking about it. It deflated a lot, but since it's a Star Wars movie there was still a sizeable audience that would go no matter what, but the drops were still big.

My question about the fan reaction is how much of it is _actually_ a ton of upset fans or just that the upset ones are the loudest, since that is almost always what happens with strong emotions. It might just be noise. Hell, I know people in my office, all but maybe a single digit number liked it and those who didn't stated the exact same reasons I'm seeing in places like this, so it's hard to tell if it's actually their opinion or a borrowed one. It could _also_ be bandwagoning.

Considering how near universal the complaints are on nearly every forum i go to, it seems like a lot.
I mean, on the other forum, it's almost comical how few defenders there are for TLJ vs the amount of people who have expressed their dislike for the movie, and how these defenders are so quick to label the haters to dismiss their opinions. So it's a sea of hate for hundreds of pages from hundreds of posters, with the same 3-5 people trying to shout them out page after page with tired arguments that were disproven two threads ago.
On here, the threads are basically just negative with a sprinkling of favorable views

It's not even TFA levels, where there were more defenders than there were haters, if not just people who thought it could have been better or average.
You can definitely see that there are more haters for this one than any movie I've ever seen. Even ones like TPM where people really really started bandwagoning after the RLM video (still haven't watched it) was released, you still saw people talking about how much they liked certain aspects and designs, despite their problems with the story/plot/characterizations.
More fan reviewers, like those on youtube, are more critical and negative about this movie than TFA.
So it definitely seems like the internet is full of people who hate/dislike this movie, at least on the geekier websites.

And again, you can definitely see that word of mouth affected ticket sales. So even if you expect sequels to make less money, the amount of people who watched it on the opening week compared to later weeks is abnormally smaller.

 

[goldenpp72]

Having just seen the recent Star Wars, I feel it made way too much as is. Very poorly done movie, and I'm not particulary invested fan of this series so I don't really care about how they handled Luke and such. Movie felt like it had ADD with so many things going on with none of it being that interesting nor well glued together. I didn't plan on chiming in on this but the narrative about only huge fans making noise isn't entirely true. The only worse SW movie to me is episode 2, with this one being comparable to episode 1.