In the history books, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle will go down as the box office champion of this Martin Luther King holiday weekend. Finishing in the top spot for a second straight weekend, Sony’s sequel to the 1995 comedy earned another $27 million to pad its domestic haul of $283 million in just four weeks. Released just a week after Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Dwayne Johnson vehicle has made audiences forget about the biggest franchise in the universe. (The Last Jedi dropped to sixth place this weekend, earning just $11.3 million in its fifth week.)
But it’s a period drama that may be just as big a winner in a bid to make its own history this award season.
That’s because director Steven Spielberg’s The Post finished in second place in its first weekend of wide release, earning a much higher than expected $18.6 million and a per-theater average that rivaled the commercial giant Jumanji ($6,598 to $7,024). And while the buzz still favors Lady Bird and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri to battle it out for a best picture Oscar, a period drama about the newspaper journalists facing down the Nixon Administration overprinting the classified Pentagon Papers is starting to peak at the right time.
“We always try to act like box office doesn’t matter for awards, but a film can certainly heighten its profile in the minds voters with a bigger than expected showing,” ComScore senior box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian told RealClearLife. It creates a bit of momentum in a wide-open awards horse race. With this weekend, I think the Post just moved up a few lengths.”
Of course, Oscar voters are notorious for opting for smaller indie darlings over bigger, popular movies — as last year’s best picture winner, Moonlight, proves. And there’s already one box office behemoth, the edgy thriller and race relations allegory, Get Out, that earned a whopping $175 million on a production budget of just $4.5 million. Last year’s water cooler talker, however, is last year’s news, having been released 11 full months ago.
Dergarabedian points out that The Post boasts the type of marquee, with Spielberg behind the camera and fellow Oscar-winners Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks in front of it, over which Academy voters swoon.
If the movie continues to gain momentum in the coming weeks, there’s a chance that buzz will be on the minds of voters when the final Oscar voting starts on Feb. 20. Considering the dearth of big movies released in January, traditionally the dumping ground for mediocre releases, there’s a chance a film with clear parallels to the Trump Administration’s adversarial relationship with the press can continue to be news.
“The Post is clearly resonating big time with the Zeitgeist,” said Dergarabedian.
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