Bad news for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, as the film had a dinosaur-sized drop between its opening and second weekends.
A sequel to 2015’s smash hit Jurassic World, the new film opened on June 22, and made $58.7 million on its first night and close to $150 million domestically during its first weekend. However, its second Friday (June 29) only brought in $17.4 million, which is a 71 percent drop in the course of a week.
To be fair, Fallen Kingdom made $60 million over the entire weekend, which is only a 59 percent drop from its opening; it was also still the #1 movie at the box office in its second weekend, though that may have been from a lack of other major competition.
Even before this, that $150 million domestic opening was a 30 percent drop from the first Jurassic World, which made $208 million; this was not too worrying, however, as it made another $600 million worldwide, for a $826.5 million total gross. So the movie has still done very well overall, but this major domestic drop does not bode well for hopes that the sequel will do as well as the original, which made $652 million domestically alone.
Major second-week drops happen on occasion; most recently there was Solo: A Star Wars Story, which fell 77 percent in its second weekend. Often the films in question are major tentpoles like Fallen Kingdom, but which are middling or bad in terms of quality, leading to lots of early attention and then disinterest when people find out that it is not very good.
Case in point, the new movie has a 51 percent approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomato, compared to the previous movie’s 71 percent; as such, it seems that fans who were on the fence about seeing the movie opted to sit it out when reviews or word of mouth made it sound less appealing than they hoped for.
There may be other factors at work: the Fourth of July is coming up, and weekends before holidays sometimes suffer from people being on vacation. That said, other films have done well on this date, so this likely only contributed to a larger problem.
Hopefully Universal can figure out how to fix these issues before Jurassic World 3‘s 2021 release date.
