Throughout Friday, most industry estimates showed Disney's Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker beating Last Jedi in its 10th day of release (on Sunday) by $12.8M. But they retreated significantly on their forecasts with the ninth-quel showing a reported running total of $361.8M through 10 days, $6.3M behind Last Jedi at the same point in time. Still, that's a pretty powerful piece of business and one that exhibition shouldn't be complaining about. Skywalker's weekend per Disney is $72M, -59% (a much better hold than Last Jedi's second weekend -68% drop), after a Saturday that was $25.3M, -3%. Five-day came in at $134.75M. The industry confidence is that Skywalker will end its domestic run around where Last Jedi was with $620.1M).
Anecdotally, the 6PM show of Skywalker at the Naples, Florida Paragon Pavilion was sold out Friday night; fans locally celebrating the ninth-quel with balloon constructions in the lobby. Imax screens drove $13M amount of business over the 5-day stretch, $6.8M over FSS for a new domestic total of $35.8M.
Between Jumanji: The Next Level's third weekend boom of $35.3M (+33%; 5-day of $59M) and Little Women's 3-day of $16.5M and 5-day opening of $29M, Sony is having a fantastic post-Christmas weekend at the box office, able to counter-program Disney monoliths Skywalker and Frozen 2 (5-day $26.1M) with family-driven product. Note the 5-day opening of Little Women completely outstrips the entire domestic reboot of Sony's Charlie's Angels ($17.7M). While a completely different comp demo and genre wise, just similar numbers, Little Women's 5-day is also very close to $29.6M that Baby Driver racked up over the same period during the July 4th 2017 stretch. Wow.
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