Dino Soars to T-Rex Sized Box Office As 'Jurassic World Rebirth' Nabs $318M Worldwide Debut
No Chris Pratt? No IMAX screens? No locusts? No problem says Scarlett Johansson and her carnivorous co-stars as 'Jurassic World 4' nets a $147 million domestic debut.
Universal and Amblin’s Jurassic World Rebirth proved dino-mite over the long holiday weekend, netting $91.5 million over the Fri-Sun portion of a $147.3 million Wed-Sun launch. With $318.3 million worldwide, it nabbed the biggest global launch of the year. The Fri-Sun portion will total around $156 million, essentially tied with last year’s $157 million weekend total. And with the comparative lack of help this time out (Elio and M3GAN 2.0 are earning a bit less than Inside Out 2 and A Quiet Place: Day One), I’d argue a proverbial tie is a relative win.
The culprit isn’t the Scarlett Johansson/Mahershala Ali/Jonathan Bailey newbie. The Gareth Edwards-directed and David Koepp-penned Jurassic World 4 earned more over its launch than Despicable Me 4 ($75 million Fri-Sun/$122 million Wed-Sun) in its respective domestic debut last year. The problem was the lack of much else in the marketplace. This time last year, there was holdover business from mid-to-late June titles, such as A Quiet Place Day One ($21 million in weekend two) and Inside Out 2 ($30 million in weekend four). This time, Elio earned $5.7 million in weekend three, and M3GAN 2.0 earned $3.8 million (-63%) in weekend two.
Last year’s holiday even benefited from two smaller but “every movie helps” openers in A24’s MaXXXine ($6.7 million) and Angel Studios’ The Story of Possum Trot ($3.1 million). This time, to be fair, I’d wager that any would-be horror competition was scared of scary dinosaurs and a… less terrifying-than-hoped M3GAN. And Angel Studios’ pretty successful The Last Ride ($15 million) did its part this past Memorial Day weekend. In healthier times, I’d argue that 5% qualifies as a margin-of-error differential. But after a piss-poor June, this July is entirely dependent on essentially three “Second or third time is the charm?” franchise revivals.
This long weekend had a single new wide release, with Jurassic being arguably the month’s only franchise that’s present-tense healthy. After that, we have one wide newbie of note, namely WB’s third Superman reboot since 2006. The following weekend offers Sony’s I Know What You Did Last Summer legacy sequel following two flop sequels (one theatrical and one direct-to-DVD) and a failed streaming revival. It’ll be joined by the second Smurfs reboot since 2017 and followed the next weekend by the fourth attempt to turn Fantastic Four into a franchise since 1994. And you wonder why AMC is adding more commercials to the pre-show presentation…