A giant Christmas weekend featuring stellar performances from Rogue One and Sing along with solid showings from specialty features like Fences and La La Land pushed the yearly domestic box office gross past $11 billion for second time in a row. 25 films, beginning with Finding Dory (486.2 million) and ending with The Conjuring 2 ($102.4 million) made over $100 million dollars. Mixed into the franchise beasts, sequels, and ever-reliable big studio CGI features were some surprising and unpredictable successes. Deadpool blew past all expectations to become the fifth highest grossing film of the year in the US and Canada at $363 million and redefined the potential for R rated films along the way. Its $783.1 million global haul was a huge boost to Fox as their other more typical superhero features from the X-Men universe have failed to live up to Marvel’s decade defining success. Sony’s Ghostbusters ($128 million) pushed the envelope for female led comedies and scored the genre’s biggest hit of the year.  Fellow girl-centric comedy Bad Moms ($113 million) along with Sully (124.8 million) and Central Intelligence (127.5 million) showed there is still room for non-franchise, non-sequel, live-action original properties at the heights of mainstream cinematic success.

As things stand the record for domestic box office revenue in a single year sits at $11.1 million from 2015. It was buoyed by monstrous hits like Jurassic World, which made $652 million and became the 4^th unadjusted best selling film of all time. The Avengers: Age of Ultron racked up $459 million that year, landing itself 10^th on the all time domestic chart. 2015’s biggest hit was of course Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Disney’s game changing re-launch of George Lucas’s historic sci-fi saga made $540 million during the scarce two weeks that it was in theatres at the end of the year.  It had such an unheard of return that it became one of the top five hits of   2016’ as well. The 396.6 million it earned after new years would put it number three in this year’s chart, just behind Captain America: Civil War’s $408 million. Rogue One may not have matched Force Awakens laser sharp star but it’s $318 million two-frame take has shown that even a so-called spinoff of the Star Wars series is draw enough to plant itself in the year’s top ten films. It’s $128 million second week earnings together with new weekend opener Sing’s $76 million launch make it very likely that our current year will set a new bar for the all time box office record.

As of Monday the total earnings for all theatrical releases in the US were $11.059 billion, and most major tracking services are predicting that the total by year’s end, thanks to a lucky Friday and Saturday left to count, will reach $11.3 billion. Expect these two major players to make up the most of the difference with a couple others chipping in the loose tens of millions. Fences opened this weekend to $11.6 million and La La Land started with  $9.2 million in limited run. Both of these will be expanding and will be joined by Live by Night and Hidden Figures, which should all carry over to the New Year and give the industry a comfortable jumpstart to 2017.

Check the latest box office estimates worldwide: