Box Office Weekend: Star Wars Wins Again, Though Revenant Strong Competition

The film opened on a Saturday and became the biggest Saturday/Sunday opening in the country – although it’s the country’s first time ever to have a Hollywood film open on a Saturday.

A Chinese man takes a picture near a model of Star Wars’ X-wing Starfighter on display at the Sanlitun Village shopping mall to promote the movie “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” in Beijing, Dec. 29, 2015. The film completes its global rollout this weekend with its debut in China, the world’s second-largest movie market. The movie zoomed past the$760.5 million record set by Avatar to become the highest-grossing film in the US and Canada in just 20 days.

“So I’m just so happy that all the work that everyone did – even the people you don’t see in the movie, the puppeteers who were painted out – I watched them in 125-degree heat in Abu Dhabi bring BB-8 to life, and then we mercilessly painted them out of the movie”. The film has now earned $1.73 billion globally after yet another strong weekend.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens leads for the fourth consecutive week with a $42.35 million weekend gross. Still, the J.J. Abrams flick kept rolling in the dough as it earned an estimated $41.6 million from 4,134 theaters in its fourth weekend of release. Internationally, it earned $3.4-M from 21 territories for a foreign take of $8.2-M and global box office take of $82.1-M. The Revenant, $US38 million ($US20.2 million) 3.

Let’s get this out of the way now: MASSIVE Star Wars: The Force Awakens spoilers are below.

Paramount’s “Daddy’s Home”, a comedy about a step-father (Will Ferrell) competing with his wife’s first husband (Mark Wahlberg) for her kid’s affections, took third place with $15 million. In the US and Canada, it is the biggest movie ever and the first to pass $800 million with $812 million so far.

It has made $116.3 million since its Christmas debut.

The film is up for Golden Globe awards on Sunday including best drama, best director and best actor for DiCaprio. I will say that it seems preposterous and wrong that the main character of the movie is not well represented in what is clearly a huge piece of the Star Wars world in terms of merchandising.

Will Smith’s Concussion was down two spots to #10 in its third week with $3.1 million.

Note: Numbers include Sunday estimates and are three-day estimates.

Weekend sales for the top 10 films rose 34 percent to $140.6 million from a year earlier, Rentrak said.