In a bodacious opening bow, The Boss Baby bypassed the behemouth Beauty and the Beast in a burly battle and banked a big box office blue ribbon. Booyah!
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, according to the prognosticators. Beauty and the Beast had dominated the box office like no other 2017 movie had, and The Boss Baby was just supposed to earn somewhere north of $30 million. If a fight was going to develop, experts believed, it’d be for second place, between Baby and Scarlett Johansson’s Ghost in the Shell.
But the suit-wearing infant was clearly not in the mood for a nap. The cute animated story pacified all resistance and collected an estimated $49 million to feather his crib. And even though Beauty and the Beast had another strong weekend as expected—about $47.5 million—Belle et al bowed to the Baby and settled snugly into second place.
But pity not Disney’s musical reboot (if you’d be so inclined). Beauty and the Beast has now earned $395.5 million in North America, making it by far the year’s biggest movie. Indeed, its collective earnings are nearly double that of 2017’s second biggest movie, Logan ($211.9 million). Oh, and the musical monster also has earned about $480.8 million overseas, bringing its worldwide total to about $876.3 million. Be our guest indeed.
Ghost in the Shell, which had also been expected to clear around $30 million this weekend, clammed up instead. It earned a rather shrimpish $19 million, according to early estimates, which might make its distributors at Paramount Pictures a little crabby.
Saban’s Power Rangers finished fourth with $14.5 million, while Kong: Skull Island pounded his way down to fifth and $8.8 million, presumably taking out plenty of evil dinos along the way.
Looking down the list a bit, The Zookeeper’s Wife, a powerful, intense film about a family that hides Jews during World War II, appeared in just about 541 theaters and still finished 10th with $3.3 million.
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