Hidden Figures Dethrones Rogue One: A Star Wars Story With Narrow Box Office Win
While it looked like it would be a tie or a narrow victory for the galaxy far, far away, final US [...]
While it looked like it would be a tie or a narrow victory for the galaxy far, far away, final US box office numbers for this past weekend gave the win to Hidden Figures. The film about real-life space travel and the role of African-American women in getting NASA astronauts into space took down the Rogue One: A Star Wars Story juggernaut by less than a million dollars in its first weekend in wide release.
Still, Rogue One's fourth weekend saw gains of around $22 million, and a close second place after three weeks on top. That gives it $477.3 million in the domestic market, and an assured finish over $500 million when its run ends. The good news continues in the foreign market, as well, which played a big game of catchup this weekend thanks to the film's debut in China, where it pulled in $31 million. Now nearly even, at $437.1 million in foreign theaters, Rogue One flew past the $900 million mark worldwide, and is nearly certain to hit a billion dollar box office haul, marking the second consecutive Star Wars movie to do so.
Hidden Figures' diverse audience helped propel it to victory, with an audience 64 percent female, 56 percent over age 35, and 57 percent non-Caucasian.
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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is in theaters now. Directed by Gareth Edwards, it's the first of the new standalone features from Lucasfilm and Disney, which take place outside the core "Skywalker Saga" of films noted by an Episode number. Rogue One tells the story of the small band of rebels that were tasked with stealing the plans to the first Death Star. The story spins directly off the opening crawl from the original Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. In that crawl, it read: "Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet."
