'Jurassic World' Made All of the Money This Weekend
Chris Pratt ran away from dinosaurs and into the record books.
Did you see Jurassic World this weekend? Ha, just kidding, I know you did. I didn’t see it, and from the box office numbers that came out this morning, I deduce I’m the only one left on the planet who hasn’t seen it at least twice.
The Jurassic four-quel pulled in an unprecedented amount of cash since being released on Friday, constantly slapping zeros onto its weekend total until settling for $204.6 million domestically and $511.8 million worldwide. It was No. 1 at the box office in all 66 worldwide markets.
The U.S. grosses give it the second-biggest opening weekend ever after The Avengers raked in $207.4 million in 2012, while its half-a-billion take secured it as the highest global weekend gross in history, obliterating Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2’s $314 million weekend in 2011. Some more superlatives to check off the list for Jurassic World: the top per-theater-average ever ($47,800); Universal Studios’ highest grossing domestic and international release ever; and the first time a movie has made more than $500 million in one weekend.
Why did everyone head back to the park? With an audience split almost evenly at 52 percent male and 48 percent female, Jurassic World seems like a perfect four-quadrant blockbuster that used its franchise name recognition to explore an old concept in a fresh way.
It also featured many dinosaurs eating people and fighting and breaking things and generally being awesome. Chris Pratt helped by riding a motorcycle looking fly as hell next to some trained velociraptors. And long live hungry mosasaurs.
Another Universal franchise, Furious 7, also blew past expectations in this otherwise so-so summer movie season. Paul Walker’s swan song was the fastest movie to get to $1 billion, at 17 days. Jurassic World looks poised to topple that record in its second week of release. After that, it’s only a matter of time before we get sequels. We’re thinking Jurassic Galaxy and Jurassic Universe should round out the new no-limits trilogy.
