Suggesting that all a fleet-footed urchin needs to make it in this world is some street smarts, quick hands, and the assistance of a nigh-omnipotent force of unquestionable cosmic power—i.e., the marketing department of the Disney corporation—Guy Ritchie’s live-action Aladdin remake has just become the latest film to pass the billion-dollar box-office mark. Given that the movie came out all the way back in late May, it had a slower-than-average climb to these particular heights—Spider-Man: Far From Home accomplished the same feat in less than a month—but still: Pretty good couple of weeks for cinema’s various impoverished orphans.
Aladdin is the 41st film to break the global milestone (although it’s worth noting, as always when talking about numbers like this, that that’s without adjusting for inflation). It’s familiar territory for Disney at this point, although its live-action remakes of animated classics do tend to fare slightly worse than the superhero stuff—Beauty And The Beast and Alice In Wonderland being the only other members of the “Used to be a lot more colorful” club to crack the big 10 digits. It’s also, in case it wasn’t obvious, Ritchie’s most successful movie ever by a pretty healthy margin, scoring nearly twice what Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows brought in, and more than 10 times the haul for his classic heist movie Snatch.
