LOS ANGELES -- Star Wars just fell to earth.
In the first big box office test of Hollywood's high-stakes summer season, Solo: A Star Wars Story collected about $103.3 million between Friday and Monday, a huge total for any franchise film -- unless that franchise is Star Wars, which has always performed at stratospheric levels. Solo also sputtered overseas, where initial ticket sales stood at about $65 million.
Disney had been hoping that the movie, focused on a young Han Solo and directed by Ron Howard, would take in closer to $140 million.
What happened?
Solo arrived in the shadow of the Death Star -- Avengers: Infinity War -- and hot on the heels of Deadpool 2 (20th Century Fox). Deadpool 2 placed second over the weekend, taking in $53.8 million between Friday and Monday, for a two-week domestic total of about $218.5 million. Infinity War (Disney) was third, collecting $22.4 million, for a five-week total of $621 million.
"Using the Marvel Cinematic Universe as an example, there will be films with box office returns like Avengers: Infinity War, but there will also be films with returns like Ant-Man," said Wade Holden, an analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence. Ant-Man arrived to $57.2 million in initial ticket sales in 2015.
Summer 2017 was terrible: Domestic ticket sales fell 16 percent, to $3.78 billion, compared to a year earlier, the result of a string of sputtering sequels -- the fifth Transformers, the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean, the eighth Alien -- and poorly made reboots like The Mummy and Baywatch.
Disney is expected to have two more blockbusters by the season's end, with Pixar's Incredibles 2 and Marvel's Ant-Man and the Wasp generating advance interest. The other major studios appear to have mostly ceded the summer to Disney, Doug Creutz, a media analyst at Cowen and Co., wrote in an April report.
For the first time in years, Warner Bros. has a superhero-free summer. (Unless you count the animated Teen Titans Go! to the Movies.) Instead, Warner will rely on Ocean's 8, which seeks to revive the Ocean's Eleven heist series with an all-female leading cast. Warner has also teamed with a Chinese company on The Meg, a campy monster shark movie scheduled for an Aug. 10 release.
"This may be short-term smart as it avoids having an expensive film crushed by Disney's juggernauts," Creutz added. "On the other hand, you can't win if you don't play."
Columbia Pictures appears to have three hit sequels on its schedule (Hotel Transylvania 3, The Equalizer 2 and Sicario: Day of the Soldado), but there are questions about the viability of Paramount's Mission: Impossible -- Fallout, the sixth chapter in that 22-year-old Tom Cruise franchise.
Book Club took fourth place with $13.1 million, and the Melissa McCarthy comedy Life of the Party came in fifth with about $7 million.
MovieStyle on 06/01/2018