Weekend Box Office: It's a Jurassic World, we're just living in it

By Katie Rife | June 25, 2018 | 4:15pm

Aux Features Film

The giddy, cathartic appeal of watching dinosaurs stomp all over humanity’s hubris remains as strong as ever, as Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom exceeded expectations with a dino-sized $150 million domestic debut. The film also demolished this week’s per-theater average like so many outhouses, making an average of $33,520 on each of its 4,475 screens. That’s still $50 million and change short of Jurassic World’s $208 million opening weekend—and $100 million short of the current champ, Avengers: Infinity War, which made $247 million domestic in its opening weekend back in April. But with stiff competition—literally, in the case of one very horny reviewer you may have heard about—from The Incredibles 2, it’s still a victory for Universal.

Speaking of, the Pixar sequel surfed a sea of inappropriate dad boners to a second place, $80.9 million second weekend; that’s a 55 percent drop from last week’s $180 million debut, but that sort of stamina is hard to keep up. (Sorry, we’ll stop now.) With most of the action concentrated on those mammoth sequels, the rest of this week’s top 10 was pretty uneventful: Solid performers Deadpool 2 and Hereditary maintained their positions at No. 5 and No. 7, respectively, and Ocean’s 8 held strong with a relatively minor 38.6 percent drop in its third week, landing at No. 3. The slope downwards was steeper for Solo: A Star Wars Story, which dropped another 59.6 percent to land at No. 6.

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Meanwhile, a gentler hero is emerging in limited release: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Oscar winner Morgan Neville’s documentary about the late Fred Rogers and his mission of spreading kindness that’s been steadily climbing the box-office charts. The film expanded into an additional 252 theaters this past weekend, propelling it from No. 15 to No. 10, so it’ll be fine without Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi’s business, thanks.

The same can’t be said for Gotti, which is already hemorrhaging screens in its second week, dropping 52.8 percent from No. 11 to No. 12 with a positively limp $812,000. Maybe there’s something about its marketing’s aggressive contempt for the press that just isn’t resonating in the current cultural climate? No, that can’t be it. Maybe it’s just the lack of consistency: After spending most of last week positing critics as enemies of the Gotti regime—typically Trumpian tweet, presented as written: “Hear it from the PEOPLE! Who do you trust??..The actual people who saw the movie or some TROLLS behind a keyboard?”—over the weekend the film’s official Twitter account started posting pull quotes from said trolls:

We’ll see if Gotti “somehow manages” to recover next week, a relatively subdued one for new releases featuring drug-war sequel Sicario: Day Of The Soldado and the basketball comedy Uncle Drew in wide release.