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Box Office Roundup: 'Rogue One' Wins, China Loves 'Great Wall', 'Collateral Beauty' Dying A Tragic Death

Published Sun, 18 Dec 2016 18:38:53 -0600

To absolutely no one's surprise, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story has crushed the worldwide box office numbers with estimates tracking at $155 million domestically and another $135 million internationally. With an overall "A" Cinemascore and 84% on RottenTomatoes it continues to validate Disney's approach to push beyond the core Star Wars saga into the Expanded Universe. What does still have to play out is if it has the legs of it's predecessor, A Force Awakens, which only saw a 40% dip from first to second weekend, even though it was up against a number of other major openings. So far Rogue One is the second best domestic December opening ever, and fourth biggest internationally.

What does seem to run counter-intuitive to the US's penchant for chest-thumping around whitewashing of foreign-set stories, the new Matt Damon historical-epic, Great Wall, has pulled in nearly half of its $150 million production budget from this weekend alone in China – nabbing $67 million. So if it doesn't bother their box office, should it bother us as much as it does our friends over at the Mary Sue? As Damon pointed out, it's not the same case as with Doctor Strange's casting of Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One (an existent Asian character), because the story for Great Wall is an original one, with his (and the other white characters) as mercenaries having come from Europe to try to steal the secrets of gunpowder. The film's trailer by itself looks amazingly weak, but it seems that by the time the Chinese box office is done with it, they'll have at least broken even, so it doesn't matter much what the US thinks.

Will Smith's having a rough time of it lately, and even though he got nods for his effort in making something out of nothing with Suicide Squad, it feels like audiences really haven't forgiven him for After Earth quite yet. His latest pull at your heart strings film, Collateral Beauty pulled in only $2.5 million domestically on Friday, and the studio is going to have to play some fuzzy math to be able to say that it pulled in the low end of projections for the weekend of $7 million. That marks Smith's lowest domestic box office day and looking to be weekend ever. RottonTomato's 14% rating for critics and abysmal 3% rating for top critics is another clash with the audience's liked it rating of 66%. However that could also mean that people do have to justify to themselves that they just spent $40+ for two people to go see this mediocrity (between tickets and some popcorn).

Office Christmas Party's 2nd weekend is even holding above Beauty, with an estimated $8.5 million weekend – down 50% from it's opening weekend of $16.9 million.

Still fighting the good fight, Potterhead's can rejoice that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them continues to pull in the cash with $5 million domestically and $14.5 million internationally. For those playing the home game, that means the Beasts has flown its broom across the $700 million mark in total. So for anyone worried that there might not be more from J.K. Rowling and company, don't worry, there'll be more where that came from.

Coming up this week will be the much anticipated but little hoped for Assassin's Creed opener along with the critically already dead-in-the-water Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Prat sci-fi film, Passengers. You know Passengers is gonna be rough when the requisite Christmas-season family comedy Why Him? has a higher critics score than something with two of the biggest box office draws are in. The one bright light on the horizon for next week is the indie film, A Monster Calls, which is definitely the best of the next crop coming up.

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