'Jurassic World' Roars at Box Office, Heading Toward One of the Biggest Opening Weekends Ever
Jurassic World is taking a bite of box office history. It’s already Universal’s biggest opening night and biggest opening ever. It’s already the biggest June opener. And it now lays claim to the third-highest opening day of all-time, behind The Avengers ($207.4 million) and Avengers: Age of Ultron ($191.3 million); Iron Man 3‘s bow ($174.1 million) would move to fourth.
As the dust clears this morning, it appears that Friday’s gross was roughly $83 million, which means that Indominus Rex’s revised weekend estimates are anywhere between $190 million and $200 million. If attendance is flat Saturday, and if we remove the $18.5 million in Thursday previews, the math still shows around a $190 million 3-day weekend. This movie garnered an “A” CinemaScore and is playing incredibly strong. The studio can thank this entertaining romp for giving it the lead in marketshare for the year so far, too.
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Insiders cite that the under-30 group for Jurassic Worid are out in a similar proportion to the original 1993 Jurassic Park. What does that mean? It means that this installment has found a completely new, young audience. The assumption would be that the original under-30 audience for this classic franchise got older.
What is certain in the next week is that Jurassic World will shake-up the annual domestic box office share, propelling Universal past current leader Warner Bros. to the $1 billion mark stateside.
But won’t the sluggish summer — which at $1.3 billion is currently flat with 2014 — throw a monkey wrench into Jurassic World’s turnstiles? No way, say distrib execs. The sentiment in the market is that audiences are ready for Jurassic World, just as they were ready to run from their living rooms when Furious 7 opened. Another pain in the Brontosaurus that won’t slow Jurassic down is a massive sporting event comparable to the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight that contributed to Avengers: Age of Ultron‘s 33 percent Friday-to-Saturday slide. Yeah, there’s the Stanley Cup Finals on Saturday between the Chicago Blackhawks and Tampa Bay Lightning, and the NBA Finals’ Game 5 on Sunday between Cleveland and Golden State, but many distrib suits say the sporting events aren’t threats in the least. Sunday moviegoing is typically the lowest of the three days and by that time, Americans will have seen Jurassic World.
