‘Jumanji’ has news for ‘The Post,’ ‘The Commuter’
NEW YORK – Meryl Streep, Liam Neeson, Taraji P. Henson and Paddington Bear all rushed into movie theaters for Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, but Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle still roared the loudest with an estimated
$27 million in ticket sales.
Jumanji easily remained the No. 1 film in North America despite an onslaught of new challengers, according to studio estimates Sunday. The reboot, starring Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart and Jack Black, is approaching
$300 million at the box office. Coming closest was Steven Spielberg’s Pentagon Papers drama The Post, starring Streep as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and Tom Hanks as editor Ben Bradlee. The awards-season hopeful is forecast to earn $22.2 million for the four-day holiday.
Strong box office results might help resuscitate the film’s Oscar momentum. The movie went home empty-handed at last weekend’s Golden Globes and wasn’t nominated by the British Academy Film Awards. Oscar nominations voting ended Friday.
Landing in third was the Neeson thriller The Commuter. The modest
$13.5 million opening for the film suggested some of the thrill of Neeson’s action-movie period may be waning.
The sequel to the children’s book adaptation Paddington 2 opened with
$10.6 million. The film, originally planned for a Christmas holiday release by The Weinstein Co., was sold to Warner Bros. after association with dis- graced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was deemed toxic.
R-rated Proud Mary, starring Henson as a hit woman, followed close behind with $10 million. The movie drew poor reviews and even criticism from John Fogerty, who accused the film of exploiting the title to his Creedence Clearwater Revival classic.
The plethora of releases, along with a host of awards contenders in limited release (led by Darkest Hour, with $4.5 million following Gary Oldman’s Golden Globe win) pushed the box office to about $190 million for the holiday weekend, said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for comScore.
Most surprising, though, is that the holiday season holdover powering the January box office isn’t Star Wars: The Last Jedi but Jumanji. The film has now been the No. 1 film two weeks running after spending its initial two weeks of release trailing The Last Jedi.
Don’t weep for The Last Jedi, though: It added $11.3 million in its fifth weekend, ranking it as the sixth-highest grossing film of all time.
Final four-day figures will be released Tuesday.