Hollywood didn't have a ton of new entries to offer this week, as studios were content to let Coco (week two) and Justice League (week three) fight it out again. Just like last time, Coco finished the weekend on top by just under ten million dollars, though the grosses this time around were a whole lot smaller. You can check out all the estimates in the chart below...
Both Coco and Justice League are a good reminder of how important expectations and budgets are when analyzing box office performance. By nearly any measure, both of these movies are extremely popular. Each will go down as one of the most popular movies of the entire year, but just being among the five or ten percent of the most popular movies of the year isn't enough for either Pixar or Warner Bros to celebrate. After three weekends, Justice League still hasn't passed two hundred million dollars domestically. To put that in context, Batman V Superman was up to almost three hundred million after its third weekend. So, it's a hit, but it's definitely not what the studio dreamed up.
Neither is Coco, at least from a profit standpoint so far. For comparison, The Incredibles was up to almost one hundred and fifty million after its second weekend. Given it's at ninety-seven percent on Rotten Tomatoes and here at CinemaBlend, we called it "a joy to watch", however, it's certainly hard to put a negative spin on Coco. In fact, given the good word of mouth, it's probably best to wait on any monetary judgments until the film completes its run. As a general rule, fun movies tend to have longer shelf lives, like that time Rocky IV won six consecutive weekends or that time Home Alone won twelve in a row. And Coco is a crowd-pleaser.
There are quite a few movies we could talk about here, but given we've been talking about expectations, let's focus on Murder On The Orient Express. The latest adaptation of Agatha Christie's second most famous novel--number one has to be And Then There Were None, right?-- was a source of speculation ahead of its premiere four weeks ago. Was there an appetite for a slow burn mystery like this? Well, the answer is apparently "seems like it". The whodunit picked up nearly seven million more domestically this weekend, which puts it well over the two hundred million mark worldwide. That's a solid return on a fifty-five million dollar budget, and it's apparently enough for the studio to commit to another round of Hercule Poirot. Next up will be Death On The Nile, which depending on how one feels about Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, is probably Christie's third or fourth most famous novel.
Just a few more things worth mentioning: Both The Disaster Artist and Titanic showed up in the top fifteen this week, with the former grabbing the twelfth spot and the latter the fourteenth. The Disaster Artist opened in just nineteen theaters and Titanic topped out at eighty-seven. Still, it's worth noting that it's a good sign for James Franco's movie that it was able to top a million dollars with such little effort, and it's, of course, also a good reminder that people still frigging love Titanic. Remember earlier when I shouted out Rocky IV and Home Alone for winning so many weekends in a row? Well, Titanic won fifteen weekends during its run. I don't care what the haters say. That movie is awesome, even if she let go.
