Friday Box Office: 'Sonic 3' Gains Speed And 'Nosferatu' Sucks Hard As 'Wicked' Tops 'Wonder Woman' (and $600M WW)

'Mufasa: The Lion King' is indeed showing post-debut holiday season legs closer to 'Mary Poppins Returns' than 'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

In a relative case of “rank doesn’t matter,” Mufasa: The Lion King will again place second at the domestic box office while still qualifying as a comparative winner. Moreover, the weekend’s big “Holy shit!” celebratory story will be the film that places third this weekend, and it will be entirely about the amount of money it makes, regardless of where it ranks. We’re going to have a Wed-Sun cume of around $275 million to end 2024, with the Fri-Sun portion coming in at $161 million, or 42% above last year’s $113 million Christmas weekend and a reasonable 20% below 2019’s Rise of Skywalker-powered $200 million totals. Last year, Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka was a key holiday hero. In contrast, this year sees his Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown riding shotgun as a “good enough” opener for being a non-franchise, adult-skewing, R-rated music-focused biopic. That’s arguably what star power looks like in the mid-2020s.