‘Jumanji’ Wins Box Office Crown Again on Unprecedented Run

Dwayne Johnson/Kevin Hart vehicle is behaving like both a superhero flick and an indie.

January 21, 2018 1:09 pm
(From l.) Nick Jonas, Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Kevin Hart and Jack Black star in JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE. (SONY)
(From l.) Nick Jonas, Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Kevin Hart and Jack Black star in JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE. (SONY)

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is not playing any games.

The Sony comedy continued its unlikely and unprecedented run atop the box office, finishing in the top spot for a third straight weekend — in its fifth weekend of release. While the $20 million that it earned from Friday to Sunday is what an observer would expect out of the top spot in the middle of January — the most frigid month on the studio calendar — the 29 percent drop this deep into a movie’s release is eye-opening.

Quite simply, the $317 million (and counting) earned domestically and the $767 million earned globally are the type of numbers befitting an installment of a major superhero franchise. Not for a sequel to a 1995 Robin Williams comedy that a large swathe of movie-goers never even knew about, much less watched.  That means the kind of mainstream film that usually lives and dies in an opening weekend is thriving based on a level of word of mouth usually reserved for award-worthy indie films.

“Usually films like this opening weekend is really everything, the entire success is built on the marketing and the concept and the good word of mouth maybe sustains it (for an extra week or two,)” ComScore senior box office analyst Paul Deragarabedian explained to RealClearLife.

“Instead, Jumanji is playing like a big summer behemoth stomping on every new movie that comes out to challenge it five weeks later.”

The comedy’s latest victim? Warner Bros.’s much more serious 12 Strong, a war drama starring Chris Hemsworth, which finished in second place with $16.5 million in its opening weekend. In third place was the weekend’s other high-profile debut, STX heist movie Den of Thieves, which opened in third with $15.3 million.

Because when Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle first hit theaters, it arrived just one week after the most hyped movie in the galaxy had arrived at the multiplex. Star Wars: The Last Jedi surprised no prognosticators by casting  a Death Star-sized shadow over the box office from the top spot for the first two weekends of Jumanji‘s theatrical run.

Throughout January, though, the Earth seems to belong to Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart. The plot twist came when Jumanji took over the top spot from The Last Jedi in its third weekend. That kind of leap has happened before — Something About Mary, for example, first hit the top spot in its 8th week in 1998 — just not on this scale for an unheralded comedy. Certainly not for one that opened so close to a Star Wars movie.

Some of this can be attributed to the combination of Johnson and Hart and to the four-quadrant appeal of a funny family-friendly film. It may also come down to the magic of a perfect window with no major rivals once audiences got tired of multiple viewings of The Last Jedi. But the alchemy is tough to bottle; the film business remains an inexact science.

By this weekend, the sixth since The Last Jedi opened, the Disney blockbuster has faded into eighth place with $6.6 million, less than a third of Jumanji‘s take. (Don’t feel too bad: The film crossed the $600 million threshold domestically.)

“The way that right out of the gate The Last Jedi was a sprinter, and Jumanji turned out to be a marathoner is unusual,” said Dergarbedian. “This movie started out as the little engine that could — and now it’s the big engine that is.”

The InsideHook Newsletter.

News, advice and insights for the most interesting person in the room.