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‘Jumanji’ leaps past ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ to win the weekend box office

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The reign of Star Wars: The Last Jedi at the top of the box office has ended after three huge weekends both domestically and overseas. Disney and Lucasfilm’s sci-fi sequel dropped to third place, with returning film Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle taking over the top spot at the weekend box office, and new arrival Insidious: The Last Key debuting in second place.

After spending the last two weekends finishing second to The Last JediJumanji leap-frogged the Star Wars sequel with an impressively strong third weekend that raked in an additional $36 million in U.S. theaters — a mere 28-percent decrease from the previous week. The ensemble jungle comedy adventure is doing a nice job of translating all of the positive buzz (and good reviews) it received its first week into box-office success, and is expected to have a few more strong weeks ahead of it.

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The fourth film in the Insidious horror franchise, The Last Key also had an impressive weekend, and ended up with the second-biggest opening weekend of the series so far (second to 2013’s Insidious Chapter 2). Given that all four movies were made for $26.5 million collectively — the last two installments each cost $10 million, while Chapter 2 cost $5 million, and the original Insidious cost just $1.5 million —  the fact that the micro-budgeted series has earned more than $219 million domestically and $420 million worldwide to date makes it one of the most successful genre franchises out there right now.

# Title  Weekend    U.S. Total   Worldwide Total 
1. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle  $36M $244.3M $519.3M
2. Insidious: The Last Key $29.2M $29.2M $49.3M
3. Star Wars: The Last Jedi $23.5M $572.5M $1.2B
4. The Greatest Showman $13.8M $75.9M $150.3M
5. Pitch Perfect 3 $10.2M $85.9M $140.9M
6. Ferdinand $7.7M $70.4M $183.3M
7. Molly’s Game $7M $14.2M $14.2M
8. Darkest Hour $6.3M $28.3M $35.7M
9. Coco $5.5M $192M $589M
10. All the Money in the World $3.5M $20.1M $27.6M

As for The Last Jedi, the latest ticket sales it added to its already massive box-office haul now have it sitting in 13th place on the all-time worldwide rankings, having passed Minions ($1.1 billion) and Captain America: Civil War on the global box-office list. Here in the U.S., The Last Jedi is currently the sixth-highest grossing movie of all time domestically, and will likely pass The Avengers ($623.3 million) to move into fifth place before it ends its run.

The rest of the weekend’s top ten films were all returning films, with two animated features — Ferdinand and Coco — among the weekend’s highest-grossing movies and Ridley Scott’s famously reshot All the Money in the World sliding into the tenth spot.

This upcoming week isn’t likely to offer much challenge to the current box-office heavyweights, with only Liam Neeson reminding everyone about his particular set of skills in action drama The Commuter, Taraji P. Henson showing off her own action chops in the assassin film Proud Mary, and Paddington 2 attempting to steer all-ages audiences away from the aforementioned animated features and into seats for a sequel to 2015’s Paddington.

Rick Marshall
Former Contributing Editor, Entertainment
A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…
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