TheJurassic WorldsequelJurassic World: Fallen Kingdomis off to a swell start at the box office, but don’t go expectingJurassic World-like numbers this weekend. The follow-up scored $15.3 million at the box office from Thursday night previews, which is a nice launch for theJ.A. Bayona-directed sequel but falls short of the $18.5 million thatJurassic Worldearned from its Thursday previews in 2015. Indeed, no one expectsFallen Kingdomto perform quite as monstrously asColin Trevorrow’s sequelboot did, which scored the biggest domestic opening weekend of all time with $208.8 million (although it was bested a few months later byThe Force Awakens).
Indeed,Fallen Kingdomis currently tracking to open in the $130 million to $140 million range, which taken separately is pretty great. But in comparison to the first movie, that’s a fairly significant dropoff. By comparison’s sake,Star Wars: The Last Jediopened only about $27 million short of the opening weekend of its predecessor. So what gives? Well, there’s less urgency surrounding theJurassic Worldfranchise for one thing, and it’s opening in the heart of the summer as opposed to December, when families are home for the holidays.
So the TL;DR here is thatJurassic World: Fallen Kingdomwill probably fall far short of its predecessor at the box office on opening weekend, but given the circumstances, it’ll still perform pretty swimmingly. The sequel has already opened in many territories internationally as Universal wanted to get ahead of the World Cup, so the film’s foreign box office total already stands at a swell $435 million.Jurassic Worldgrossed over $1 billion internationally alone.
We’ll see how highFallen Kingdomsoars this weekend, but it’s got solid competition in Pixar’sIncredibles 2, which smashed the opening weekend record for an animated film last weekend. It’ll likely be knocked into the #2 position byFallen Kingdom, but it’s gonna put up a solid fight.
