“Beauty and the Beast” Delivers Monstrous Debut

By Kip Mooney • On • In News, Weekend Box Office Report News, Weekend Box Office Report 0

BOX OFFICE REPORT

March 17-19, 2017

(estimates from BoxOfficeMojo.com)

TOP 5

Beauty and the Beast  $170.0 million
Kong: Skull Island $28.8 million
Logan $17.5 million
Get Out $13.2 million
The Shack $6.1 million

It was a tale as old as time, but audiences lined up anyway. With an estimated $170 million, Beauty and the Beast took several records at once: It's the biggest March opening ever. It's the seventh-biggest opening of all time. And in just three days it became the second-biggest movie of 2017 thus far. And it's the biggest opening of Disney's live-action remakes. With little in the way of competition until The Fate of the Furious, this is likely to end as one of the five biggest movies of the year.

Kong: Skull Island fell a predictable 52.7 percent, which puts it over $110 million, but still out of reach of its $185 million budget. Still, it should be fine once international grosses are included. Logan won't need that help, as it's already made more than any other solo Wolverine outing (and more than the last X-Men movie too). It should top $200 million by next weekend.

Get Out continues its improbable run, dropping only a mere 36 percent. That's an extremely successful hold that's rare these days. It could end up with $150 million before it's all said and done, and make it one of the biggest horror movies ever. That's more than you can say for The Shack, which will be lucky to finish with $50 million. Certainly not the miraculous return they were hoping for.

Outside the top 5:

  • This Weekend's Indie Champ: T2, the sequel to Trainspotting. The Danny Boyle-directed follow-up averaged $36,000 on each of its five screens.
  • Despite mixed reviews, Song to Song also opened strongly in limited release. The latest Terrence Malick drama averaged $13,486 on each of its four screens.
  • The Belko Experiment couldn't get a killer opening. The extremely violent corporate satire opened with only $4 million.

Next weekend:

A lot of big movies that probably won't get anywhere. There's the nostalgia war of Power Rangers against adaptation of CHiPs, which seems to take a beat from 21 Jump Street and The Brady Bunch Movie. They'll be taking on the sci-fi thriller Life, but I would be shocked if any of them made more than $20 million.

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About Kip Mooney

Kip Mooney
Like many film critics born during and after the 1980s, my hero is Roger Ebert. The man was already the best critic in the nation when he won the Pulitzer in 1975, but his indomitable spirit during and after his recent battle with cancer keeps me coming back to read not only his reviews but his insightful commentary on the everyday. But enough about a guy you know a lot about. I knew I was going to be a film critic—some would say a snob—in middle school, when I had to voraciously defend my position that The Royal Tenenbaums was only a million times better than Adam Sandler’s remake of Mr. Deeds. From then on, I would seek out Wes Anderson’s films and avoid Sandler’s like the plague. Still, I like to think of myself as a populist, and I’ll be just as likely to see the next superhero movie as the next Sundance sensation. The thing I most deplore in a movie is laziness. I’d much rather see movies with big ambitions try and fail than movies with no ambitions succeed at simply existing. I’m also a big advocate of fun-bad movies like The Room and most of Nicolas Cage’s work. In the past, I’ve written for The Dallas Morning News and the North Texas Daily, which I edited for a semester. I also contributed to Dallas-based Pegasus News, which in the circle of life, is now part of The Dallas Morning News, where I got my big break in 2007. Eventually, I’d love to write and talk about film full-time, but until that’s a viable career option, I work as an auditor for Wells Fargo. I hope to one day meet my hero, go to the Toronto International Film Festival, and compete on Jeopardy. Until then, I’m excited to share my love of film with you.

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