Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Looks To Dominate The Box Office Again

When the Star Wars franchise moved from its usual May release window to December with J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens, fans were curious as to what kind of impact that’d have on its box office performance. Now, with the aforementioned film already having proven to be a smashing success and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story performing extremely well, too, it’s clear that the move was for the best.

Proving that point even further is this weekend’s box office numbers. It’s only Saturday, but Gareth Edwards’ prequel is already off to a fantastic start, pulling in $18 million on Friday and bringing its domestic total to a whopping $393 million. That means it’s now sitting at $706 million worldwide, and with the weekend not even close to being done yet, you can expect that number to climb significantly higher by Monday morning. Furthermore, January is looking to be a pretty slow month for new releases, as it always is, so fans can expect Rogue One to keep raking in the money for Disney as the weeks continue.

Elsewhere at the box office, Sing did a respectable $16.8 million on Friday and looks like it’ll have another strong showing this weekend, especially with children on winter break and families looking for films to take the young ones to. Of course, it also helps that the animation has been receiving mostly positive reviews and boasts a stellar cast.

In third place sits what’s been one of 2016’s biggest disappointments: Passengers. It did make $5.6 million on Friday to bring its domestic total to $50 million, but the critics have not been too kind to this one. The star power of Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt is definitely giving it some legs at the box office, but Sony no doubt expected a much better performance given the popularity of those two aforementioned actors.

Finally, we’ve got Moana and Fences closing out the top 5, pulling in $4.3 million and $3.4 million, respectively. Not huge numbers by any means, but the former already sits at a healthy $203 million domestically while the latter has now made Paramount a small profit, given that it’s accumulated $23 million off a $20 million budget. Both have earned excellent reviews as well and will no doubt be marked down as successes for their respective studios.

Circling back to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story though, and it’s great to see the film performing so well. Over the summer, those reshoot rumors cast doubt over the prequel for a lot of people, and while most will agree that it isn’t quite as good as The Force Awakens, it’s still another excellent chapter in the iconic franchise and has us eagerly anticipating what’s to come from that galaxy far, far away.