• Box Office

World Box Office Jan 8 – Jan 14, 2018

In this week’s roundup, several 75th Golden Globe winners and prominent nominees saw an immediate boost from their well-deserved prizes, while the last blockbusters of 2017 had a surprising reversal of fortune with their second forays into the new year over Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend.

Best Picture – Drama winner, and also winner of Best Screen Play, as well as Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor for Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri went wide again for its scale, adding 712 theatres this past session. Fox Searchlight’s winning number took $2.3 million, a 226% jump from its previous showing, and will cross $30 million by the time holiday sales are tallied. Overseas it earned $7.7 million, reaching a $10 million cume in its 12 foreign markets for a global total of $38.5 million.

Fellow Best Picture winner Lady Bird from A24 pictures, who took the prize in the Musical or Comedy category, had a modest expansion adding 90 theaters for a total of 652 locations this weekend. It took $1.68 million in the US over the three-day period and will end the four-day period around $2 million even. Currently Lady’s domestic cume is at $36.8 million. Best Actress winner Saorise Ronan found her charm had plenty of international appeal on a wide festival circuit last year, but so far foreign general audiences haven’t had the chance to judge for themselves. Focus, its international distributor, put off their first releases until February 15, while some planned markets will have to wait until late March and even May to see it in theaters.

The Shape of Water, Fox Searchlight’s winner of the award for Best Director with Guillermo del Toro’s fantastic visual story-telling, actually cut 71 theaters this frame and ended with $2.7 million. This film about love knowing no boundaries easily crossed its first border into del Toro’s native Mexico where it was the number one movie with a $3.2 million opening frame, leaving theater owners clamoring to add more dates and get copies of the film onto their screens. Further foreign launches begin this week and stretch to March 1, when it lands in Japan.

Each of these fine cinematic achievements had expectedly strong showings this week, but among Hollywood’s heavyweight earners there was a reversal of fortunes. Sony’s surprise super-hit Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle landed an early stopping blow on Star Wars: The Last Jedi with its $108.94 million global frame, a real kneecapping to its competitor’s $30.2 million (on the domestic market, it was $35.4 million to $ 15.2 million). The Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart led comedy reached a global cume of $673.4 million and looks likely to hold onto the top spot globally and domestically for another week. Star Wars, meanwhile, may have to concede to ending its global run just short of $1.4 billion.

12 Strong, an Afghanistan war drama starring Chris Hemsworth and Michael Shannon, opens next week and looks like it has the best shot of unseating our current box office champ. Joining it is Gerard Butler’s heist movie Den of Thieves and Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren’s snowbird road trip film The Leisure Seeker.

See the latest world box office estimates: