‘Jumanji’ wins the weekend box office again as ‘The Post’ finally goes wide

Sony Pictures’ jungle-adventure sequel Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle continued to make the best of the annual January movie doldrums, winning the holiday weekend box office for the second time and building on the film’s already impressive run.

The film’s $27 million weekend increased its domestic haul to a hefty $283.1 million, and while the overall weekend wasn’t exactly a big one at theaters — January is typically a low-key month for movies — Jumanji has quickly solidified its status as a bona fide blockbuster.

The other big story over the weekend was the expansion of Oscar-friendly drama The Post into 2,783 more theaters as the film’s Academy Awards buzz grows. With the Oscars ceremony kicking off in March, Steven Spielberg’s timely political drama has been getting a lot of attention lately. The film’s wide release didn’t do anything to slow that momentum, as it now holds an 88-percent positive review score on Rotten Tomatoes and an “A” grade on audience polling site CinemaScore.

This is all good news for The Post as it raises its profile in the lead-up to the Academy Awards.

Beyond the continued success of Jumanji and The Post, a trio of new releases also made it into the weekend’s top ten films.

Liam Neeson’s train-bound action film The Commuter underperformed expectations quite a bit, taking in a third of what Taken 3 raked in over the same weekend in 2015. The film’s 55-percent positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and “B” grade on CinemaScore suggest that Neeson’s particular set of skills — at least as far as action movies go — might not be the box-office draw they used to be.

On the flip side, family-friendly sequel Paddington 2 earned extremely positive reviews from professional critics and audiences alike — to the tune of a rare, 100-percent positive score on Rotten Tomatoes. Unfortunately, that didn’t translate at the box office, and the film earned just $10.6 million for its opening weekend. It remains to be seen whether it can pick up the pace a bit as word gets out about it.

Finally, assassin thriller Proud Mary had a perfectly respectable $10 million debut, given that the film cost around that much to make. The movie casts Taraji P. Henson as a deadly hit woman, and despite negative reviews, it did just fine at the box office despite coming in at the lower end of box-office pundits’ projections.

As for the upcoming week, it looks like another slow one at theaters. The most high-profile films debuting this weekend are the crime drama Den of Thieves starring Gerard Butler, O’Shea Jackson Jr. (the son of Ice Cube, who portrayed his father in Straight Outta Compton), and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson; and the true-life war drama 12 Strong: The Declassified True Story of the Horse Soldiers, starring Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth.