'Jurassic World Rebirth' Nabs Despicable $26.3M Friday as Universal Again Rules Independence Day Holiday Box Office
'F1' and 'M3GAN 2.0' dropped hard, but 'Jurassic World Rebirth' looks to earn about as much over its Wed-Sun weekend as 'Fallen Kingdom' and 'Dominion' earned over their respective Fri-Sun debuts.
Remember everything I wrote last year about Universal’s Minions and Despicable Me movies having shockingly consistent opening weekends over (or around) the Independence Day holiday? Well, this is the first time a Jurassic movie has been designated as the year’s July 4th tentpole, but the same thing applies. Jurassic World Rebirth is on course to earn about as much over its five-day holiday debut as Fallen Kingdom ($148 million in 2018) and Dominion ($145 million in 2022) earned over their respective Fri-Sun debuts. Moreover, it’s concurrently pulling grosses essentially in line with the various Illumination tentpoles ($143 million Wed-Sun in 2013, $123 million Fri-Mon in 2022, $123 million Wed-Sun in 2024, etc.) on this specific holiday frame. Allow me to bravely predict that Illumination’s Minions 3 will earn around $125 million during its Wednesday-to-Sunday debut next July 4 weekend.
Universal and Amblin’s Jurassic World Rebirth, starring Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Jonathan Bailey, earned another $26.3 million on Friday, bringing its three-day domestic total to $82.1 million. That’s a 4% jump from its Thursday gross and a reasonable 14% decline from its $30.5 million opening day. Barring a fluke in either direction, we’re looking at an over/under $145 million Wed-Sun gross. And Universal is likely looking at around $313 million globally by Sunday night, right between A Minecraft Movie ($301 million) and Lilo & Stitch ($341 million) among this year’s top global debuts. And that’s without taking my advice to make the climactic Distortus-Rex into a kaiju-sized Minion! The Internet keeps asking why Hollywood keeps making Jurassic movies. It’s because general audiences, including non-obsessive fans across all demographics, consistently turn out in relatively high numbers.
There are other reasons, including a relative scarcity of both products and franchise-specific entertainment value. (comparative). Jurassic is where you go for a PLF-friendly adventure featuring non-fantastical and non-superpowered soldiers, scientists, and civilians encountering and/or getting eaten by dinosaurs. We all loved Sinners, but at no point in Ryan Coogler’s genre-hybrid musical epic did anyone get eaten by a dinosaur. Joseph Kosinski’s F1 ran 155 minutes — while hogging all of the IMAX screens that otherwise would have gone to Jurassic World 4 — and still couldn’t find time for a scene where Brad Pitt’s protagonist swears vengeance after watching his friend and former teammate (Javier Bardem) get torn limb from limb by a tyrannosaurus rex. I mean… adding dinosaurs and/or Cadillacs couldn’t have *hurt* M3GAN 2.0 and or (deep breath) From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, right?
Scarcity also pertains to brand management. Even a decade ago, Jurassic World’s pre-release marketing campaign refreshingly focused on the film itself rather than hints or clues about the sequel. We didn’t even know any concrete plot details about Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom until the trailer dropped in late 2017. Over the past decade, we’ve seen four Jurassic World theatrical films and exactly one surprisingly excellent Netflix animated episodic (with Camp Cretaceous and Chaos Theory — my son’s favorite show — existing within the same long-form narrative featuring the same primary characters) beginning in 2020. Likewise, we’ve had almost no non-theatrical Illumination “content” and just one intentional Fast & Furious theatrical spin-off (Hobbs & Shaw) and one solid Netflix animated show (Spy Racers). Amid that same period, we’ve had seven (some better than others) live-action Disney+ Star Wars shows.
I’ve said many, many times that Hollywood might have saved itself had it noticed that just three years after The Avengers grossed $1.517 billion and sent the industry on a self-imploding mission to turn every recognizable piece of IP into a cinematic universe, both Furious 7 ($1.515 billion in 2-D) and Jurassic World ($1.671 billion) outgrossed Avengers: Age of Ultron (a still towering $1.4 billion) showed that there was more than one way to build a blockbuster franchise. Anyway, Jurassic World Rebirth is kicking exactly the sort of commercial ass we’ve come to expect from the series. It’s also kicking the near-identical amount of box office butt we’ve come to expect — a projected $85 million Fri-Sun launch would rank fifth sans inflation for the holiday — from Universal over this specific patriotic nationalistic ??? holiday.