Jurassic World Rebirth has outperformed expectations at the box office in its opening week, with the latest instalment of the dinosaur franchise recording over $318m in revenue worldwide after initial projections suggested it might make $260m.
The film opened over the Fourth of July holiday weekend in North America, releasing into US cinemas on Wednesday 2 July – a standard tactic to help boost opening-weekend figures. The film grossed more than $147m (£108m) over five days (Wednesday to Sunday) in the US and Canada, and recorded $171m (£126m) in the rest of the world.
The results are significantly better that what had been predicted: studio Universal had estimated it would score around $100m-$120m in North America, and just over twice that overseas. With an entirely new cast, led by Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey, producers were not overly optimistic of its chances, given that Independence Day is not a traditional moviegoing holiday. Critical reaction has been mixed, with the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw being particularly enthusiastic with a four star rating, saying: “It feels relaxed and sure-footed in its Spielberg pastiche, its big dino-jeopardy moments and its deployment of thrills and laughs”.
The film’s chances of profitability are also helped by the (relatively) restricted production budget, reported at $180m compared to the $845m spent on its two predecessors, Fallen Kingdom and Dominion.
However, analysis shows that the film’s figures fall somewhat short of previous Jurassic World films. Rebirth earned $91.5m over the actual weekend (Friday to Sunday), considerably less than Fallen Kingdom ($148m) and Dominion ($145m) over their equivalent periods, while the first franchise reboot Jurassic World took $208m in 2015.
