‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ Crashes At The Box Offices & Fails Overseas

The hyperdrive is shot, the shields are down, and no one is making the jump to lightspeed: Lucasfilm just took the first significant hit of its Disney era. “Solo: A Star Wars Story” failed to launch at the box office this Memorial Day weekend, and arguably just crash landed in the ugliest fashion. The new “Star Wars” prequel barely cracked $101 million over the four-day weekend, grossing $83 million over three days. It’s difficult to call a film that’s opened with over $100 million a “bomb,” but considering its price tag is north of $300 million after its expensive, several-months-long reshoots and blockbuster expectations from all “Star Wars” properties, this is a massive disappointment and blow to the multi-billion-dollar franchise. 05.28.18 Update: the final 4-day tally for ‘Solo’ domestically is $103 million.

To put this into sobering perspective, ‘Solo’s opening is worse than the comparative Memorial Day Weekend openings of “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” “Indiana Jones And The Crystal Skull,” “X-Men: The Last Stand” and even “The Hangover Part II,” most of those films released more than ten years ago (more context, its numbers are even lower than non-Memorial Day weekend openings like “Thor 2” and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”).

LISTEN: ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’: Spoilers, Easter Eggs, Box Office, And More! [Podcast]

Its $83 million three-day-weekend debut is a massive -46% drop down from the last ‘Star Wars Story,’ spinoff “Rogue One” ($155M in its opening) which went on to gross more than $1 billion at the box office. With these numbers, it’s safe to say ‘Solo’ won’t even come close to that figure and very possibly not even half. Additionally, it should be noted that ‘Solo’ earned the lowest opening weekend gross of a “Star Wars” film since ‘Attack Of The Clones’ in 2002 ($80) and was beaten by the numbers of 2005’s ‘Revenge Of The Sith.’

Making matters far, far worse, and where Lucasfilm should be extremely concerned is ‘Solo’s international box office performance. The “Star Wars” adventure earned only $65 million over three days. That’s a $148.3M worldwide total, even less than the entire domestic opening of “Rogue One.” China was a dismal failure too with a $10 million opening, and Lucasfilm likely realizes they have a lot of work to put into “Star Wars” enthusiasm and awareness in that critical market.

What went wrong? No hot takes, folks, dozens of factors are in play. More analysis this weekend, but it ain’t just one thing, but yes, maybe the mooted sequel is in doubt.

Meanwhile, “Deadpool 2” took a hard hit this weekend falling -66%, a fairly sizable drop for a blockbuster (comparatively ‘Infinity War’ only fell -55% in week two), but it has crossed the $200 million mark at home and is closing in on $500 million worldwide ($487M) so its health is not really in doubt at this point. Speaking of that ‘Avengers’ film, it only dropped a healthy -44% in week five and now has hit $612 million domestically, $1.9 billion globally. At this rate, the coveted $2 billion threshold is probably one weekend away.

Domestically, ‘Infinity War’ is currently the seventh-highest grossing film of all time in stateside, and it’s $77 million away from catching up to “Black Panther” which is all of $1.5 million away from hitting the $700 million mark. Many estimates put ‘Infinity War’ around $660-ish million which will fall short of the Ryan Coogler-directed phenomenon.

Three-day weekend box office chart below. Updates to follow when official four-day numbers are in.

1. Solo: A Star Wars Story – $83,325,000
2. Deadpool 2 – $42,700,000 ($207,407,352)
3. Avengers: Infinity War – $16,494,000 ($621,688,638)
4. Book Club – $9,450,000 ($31,834,516)
5. Life of the Party – $5,115,000 ($39,102,348)
6. Breaking In – $4,055,000 ($35,643,385)
7. Show Dogs – $3,078,235 ($10,672,960)
8. Overboard – $3,000,000 ( $41,494,413)
9. A Quiet Place – $2,230,000 ($179,993,607)
10. RBG – $1,120,000 ($5,636,638)