Tired of dinosaurs yet? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Neither is the movie-going public.
For the fourth straight weekend, Jurassic World laid claim to a little mini-epoch and cemented itself as the biggest, baddest, roaringest movie around. Sure, maybe it’s looking a bit long in the tooth these days, earning a mere $30.9 million. But as any dinosaur worth its chops will tell you, the longer the tooth, the bigger the bite.
Jurassic World has proved to be such a dino-sized success at the box office that—just as in days gone by—history is its only real competition. Already the biggest movie of 2015 with $558.1 million, World passed The Dark Knight to become North America’s fourth biggest flick ever (not adjusted for inflation of course), lagging only behind The Avengers ($623.4 million), Titanic ($658.7 million) and Avatar ($760.5 million). And worldwide, it’s fifth all-time with $1.385 billion, just a smidgen behind Furious 7′s $1.512 bil.
But the dinosaurs of World can’t go anywhere these days without an emotional 11-year-old girl tagging along. Pixar’s Inside Out (featuring the heretofore mentioned 11-year-old Riley) finished second to World for the third straight week, collecting $30.1 million, plumping up its own overall take to $246.2 mil.
These two holdovers spoiled the debuts of two apparently not-so-hotly anticipated sequels. Terminator: Genisys, featuring the still buff former governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, finished third with $28.7 million. That’s well behind what its predecessors did, which might turn Schwarzenegger into a liar when he said, “I’ll be back.”
But Genisys at least stayed in the same box office neighborhood as its predecessors. Magic Mike XXL, the R-rated male stripper fantasy starring Channing Tatum, wasn’t even on the same bus route. It earned just $11.6 million—less than a third what the original did. Still, Box Office Mojo says the latest Mike movie cost a mere pittance (just $14.2 million), and perhaps its receipts will be goosed a bit by all the dollar bills its fans presumably threw at the screen.
Ted 2 rounded out the Top Five with an $11 million weekend, losing two-thirds of its audience week-over-week. I think the only way this franchise will see a third installment is if they refashioned it to take advantage of our cultural fascination with apocalyptic zombie flicks. They’d call it Night of the Living Ted, naturally.
Final figures update: Well, there’s been an unexpected upset. 1. Inside Out, $29.8 million; 2. Jurassic World, $29.2 million; 3. Terminator: Genisys, $27 million; 4. Magic Mike XXL, $12.9 million; 5. Ted 2, $11.2 million.
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