Weekend Forecast for December 29-31, 2017
By Reagen Sulewski
December 29, 2017
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Here comes the love triangle.
It's pretty close to “second verse, same as the first” for the final weekend of 2017's box office, with just one medium-sized exception of a Christmas Day opening film. Most of the remaining films are keeping their power dry until the January expansion period, but there's still a great plethora of films vying for big bucks.

All The Money In The World skipped the weekend and opened wide on Dec 25, but you might have forgiven anyone involved with this if it needed to wait, you know, a couple of weeks or so. One of the first casualties of the Kevin Spacey sexual harassment claims, this docudrama of the kidnapping saga of J. Paul Getty's grandson had Spacey playing the patriarch of this family, the richest man in the world at the time, and maybe of all time (relatively speaking). Suddenly, it found itself with a toxic actor in a significant role.

To the casting machine! And director Ridley Scott made the radical decision to replace Spacey with Christopher Plummer *and* to keep the original release date. In what seems to be a heroic feat of filmmaking, he's made this change, kept it on time for release and gotten a performance out of him that's a threat for an Oscar. It's one of those things that you couldn't script, and I halfway expect this story to itself become an Oscar nominated movie in 15 years or so (starring: Donald Sutherland as Christopher Plummer).

But that's very little about the movie itself – it details the hunt for Getty's grandson's kidnappers (in an almost quaint detail, they're Italian mob) and his refusal to (openly) pay one thin dime since he reasoned it would just lead the rest of his relatives open to be kidnapped. Michelle Williams and Andrew Buchan play his mother and father, while Mark Wahlberg plays a former CIA spy sent to negotiate his release and/or find out if this was a real kidnapping. Opening to $2.6 million on Christmas Day, it's earned about $3 million more since then and should secure about $5 million over the NYE weekend.

The remainder of our wide releases are returning films and can almost mechanically be predicted for their takes this weekend: Star Wars: The Last Jedi should add about $75 million after a slightly shocking two-thirds drop in its second frame, though it's still headed towards $600 million or so. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle was the big winner of the new films last weekend and ought to bring in about $50 million, headed well over $200 million domestic.

Pitch Perfect 3 proved to be the film no one really wanted, limping in with about $19 million on opening weekend, and sliding the most of any film over the holiday week. It should add about $15 million this weekend.

The Greatest Showman should find itself with about the same amount this weekend, on its way to around $70 million domestic, which I cannot think was the hope for it. Ferdinand did what it could with the holiday week, but started smaller than hoped and should add about $13 million here, moving towards $80 million domestic. Coco, its main competition for animation, should bring in about $9 million, but will be another Pixar film that fails to cross $200 million.

Downsizing is looking like a major flop with the Matt Damon-led satire of consumerism heading towards $6 million in its second weekend and about $25 million total domestic. At least it has Father Figures to look down on, which will be looking up at $20 million when it's all said and done.