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Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker To Cross $1 Billion At Box Office This Week
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is set to cross $1 billion at the worldwide box office this week. Even by their lofty standards, Disney had a pretty incredible run in 2019, absolutely dominating the multiplex by seeing six of their titles earn $1 billion or more globally. Of course, that long list includes mega blockbuster Avengers: Endgame, which managed to unseat James Cameron's Avatar as the highest-grossing film of all-time. More recently, animated hit Frozen II joined the club, becoming the highest-grossing animated movie ever. What's even more remarkable is things didn't stop there for the Mouse House.
The studio closed out 2019 with the highly-anticipated premiere of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the culminating chapter of the Skywalker saga. While the film unfortunately posted the lowest opening weekend of the sequel trilogy, it still proved to be a sizable hit over the holiday season and remained on top of the charts for three weekends before losing the #1 spot to 1917. The Rise of Skywalker appears to be losing some steam commercially now, but it's about to hit a milestone.
According to The Wrap, The Rise of Skywalker should pass the $1 billion mark this week, becoming Disney's seventh 2019 release to earn that much at the box office. The Rise of Skywalker will be the 46th film all-time to earn $1 billion and the 39th released during the 2010s, illustrating how drastically things changed in the past decade.
Budgeted at approximately $275 million, The Rise of Skywalker will definitely go down as a commercial success. That said, it's a little more modest than its predecessors. While The Force Awakens' total of $2.068 billion was never attainable (Star Wars doesn't have the same pull internationally as other blockbuster franchises), it seems highly unlikely The Rise of Skywalker will match or surpass The Last Jedi's haul of $1.3 billion. That's a bit surprising, since in the past, the third installment of a Star Wars trilogy outgrossed the second. To put this in perspective, it took The Last Jedi three weekends to hit $1 billion, while The Rise of Skywalker is approaching its fifth. That demonstrates the Star Wars franchise has lost some of its clout since the Disney renaissance kicked off in 2015. Few could have predicted The Lion King would have made more than Rise of Skywalker.
With this in mind, it's probably for the best Disney is putting the Star Wars films on hiatus for the next few years (focusing their efforts on Disney+ shows like The Mandalorian instead). Even Bob Iger will admit the studio rushed out new Star Wars content, and the rapid pace at which the new movies came out seems to have killed some of the enthusiasm audiences had for the galaxy far, far away. Some time off will probably do the Star Wars movies some good, as Lucasfilm figures out their next course of action - be it the High Republic, Old Republic, or something in between. It's true $1 billion is a nice sum any movie would like, but for the final entry in the Skywalker saga, it was hard to not expect a bit more.
