America Goes Cuckoo for “Coco”

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

BOX OFFICE REPORT

November 24-26, 2017

(estimates from BoxOfficeMojo.com)

TOP 5

Coco $49.0 million
Justice League $40.7 million
Wonder $22.3 million
Thor: Ragnarok  $16.7 million
Daddy's Home 2 $13.2 million

While it didn't reach the heights of other Pixar endeavors, Coco was another Thanksgiving victory for the animation studio. Its $49 million opening puts on the lower end of Pixar's output, but with more than $71 million since it opened late Tuesday, it's on its way to being one of the biggest animated movies of the year. With nothing in the way of competition until Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens in three weeks, it should have plenty of time to top its stablemate Cars 3, as well as The Boss Baby and The LEGO Batman Movie. But it will need some help if it wants to be among the 13 Pixar releases to earn more than $200 million domestically.

Justice League fell more than 50 percent, which is pretty typical for big blockbusters. It should pass $200 million by next weekend, and like Coco, will luck out by not having any competition for a while. But there's still no way to spin this positively, even though it will still earn more than half a billion dollars worldwide, which no one should ever really complain about.

Wonder continued its impressive run. The inspirational family drama has nearly topped $70 million in just 10 days, which is pretty shocking for a movie that doesn't feature any explosions. Thor: Ragnarok slipped to fourth place and Daddy's Home 2 dropped to fifth, meaning it's likely to finish well below its predecessor.

Outside the top 5:

  • This Weekend's Indie Champ: Call Me by Your Name, the coming-of-age summer romance that's been praised endlessly since its debut at Sundance. It was by far 2017's biggest opening average, with $101,219 on each of its four screens. That makes it one of only 28 movies in history to earn that distinction.
  • When is a 7100 percent increase not a big deal? When the movie in question is Roman J. Israel, Esq. The new Denzel Washington drama expanded to a wide release, but only made $4.5 million. That's less than what A Bad Moms Christmas made in its fourth weekend.
  • The Man Who Invented Christmas did not get audiences in the holiday spirit. The Charles Dickens biopic – specifically about the writing of A Christmas Carol – only managed $1.3 million over the weekend. Hardly the runaway hit Dickens' story was.

Next weekend:

As typical for Hollywood studios, December 1 is a complete dead zone. The only new releases are limited runs for Oscar hopefuls The Shape of Water, Wonder Wheel and The Disaster Artist, the latter of which goes wide the following week.

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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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