Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ creature feature opened in theaters to the tune of $61 million domestically and $142 million worldwide, and earned generally positive reviews from professional critics and audiences alike. However, much like director Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong, Skull Island is saddled with a massive price tag that the film could struggle to cover despite its respectable debut.
Skull Island cost the studio upwards of $185 million to make, and all of the additional costs to get it into theaters worldwide will likely mean the film needs to clear around $400 million worldwide to break even. Still, with many schools going on week-long vacations over the next month or so, there could be more than enough ticket sales to go around.
| # | Title | Weekend | U.S. Total | Worldwide Total |
| 1. | Kong: Skull Island | $61M | $61M | $142.6M |
| 2. | Logan | $37.8M | $152.6M | $438.2M |
| 3. | Get Out | $21M | $111M | $111M |
| 4. | The Shack | $10M | $32.2M | $32.4M |
| 5. | The Lego Batman Movie | $7.8M | $159M | $275.5M |
| 6. | Before I Fall | $3.1M | $9M | $9M |
| 7. | Hidden Figures | $2.7M | $162.8M | $206M |
| 8. | John Wick: Chapter Two | $2.7M | $87.4M | $153M |
| 9. | La La Land | $1.7M | $148.4M | $416.8M |
| 10. | Fifty Shades Darker | $1.6M | $112.9M | $368.8M |
Following Skull Island on the list were Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine swan song Logan and Jordan Peele’s thriller Get Out, which both won their respective opening weekends and stayed strong in theaters for yet another week. Logan is currently the fifth highest-grossing film in the X-Men franchise worldwide with $438.2 million so far, and will likely move past fourth-place X-Men: The Last Stand ($459.4 million) before its run concludes. It’s also the best-reviewed film of the entire X-Men franchise, narrowly edging out 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past and last year’s Deadpool on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
Get Out also set a new record over the weekend by becoming the fastest movie from “micro-budget” horror studio Blumhouse Productions to cross the $100 million mark. The race-based thriller moved past $100 million in just 17 days, beating the 19 days it took for M. Night Shyamalan’s Split to do the same.
Skull Island was the only new release to make it into the week’s top ten films, and will likely find its time at the top of the chart ending when Beauty and the Beast hits theaters this upcoming week. The latest live-action adaptation of a Disney animated feature, Beauty and the Beast is expected to dominate a weekend that also features the release of Trainspotting 2 — the sequel to Danny Boyle’s 1996 dark comedy — and Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn’s horror thriller The Belko Experiment, about the staff in a high-rise office building being forced to murder each other for mysterious reasons.
