‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ Struggling to Second-Place Opening in China

“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is struggling its opening weekend in China, only grossing ¥62M ($9.5 million) on opening day, including midnight screenings.

On opening day, “The Force Awakens” earned ¥212 million ($32.7 million) and it went on to earn $52 million, while “Rogue One” grossed ¥72 million ($11 million) and eventually grossed $30 million.

From Thursday midnight showings, “The Last Jedi” earned just ¥3.4M ($520,000), while “The Force Awakens” grossed ¥15.9 million ($2.5 million) and “Rogue One” earned ¥3.7 million ($570,000).

AND HERE COME THE EXCUSES...

Reasons 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' Is A Catastrophic Flop In China

In its opening weekend in China, Star Wars: The Last Jedi has failed not only to reach the low end of most analysts’ already subdued estimates for its box office collections, but with its $9.4 million Friday debut and $11 million Saturday it barely got halfway to those deeply pessimistic projections.

I had downgraded my expectation from $125-$140 million gross after I saw the picture to $80-$100 million, even privately thinking $50 million might be the picture’s final result. Now even $50 million looks like a stretch, given The Last Jedi’s dismal $21 million Friday-Saturday start (including Thursday midnight screenings) and the barrage of competition it will face next weekend, with Jumanji and four other wide openers bound to take away most of its screens.

The Star Wars sequel’s Friday debut of 61 million yuan ($9.4 million) was less than 1/3rd of The Force Awaken’s 212 milion yuan ($33 million) start 2 years ago, and astonishingly, it even fell short of Rogue One’s opening numbers.

Contrary to what some movie analysts have written, this is not a failure of marketing. Disney pulled out the stops for its Episode VIII release, partnering with leading cinema chain Wanda to create a “Star Wars Art Zone” promotion in 110 multiplexes nationwide. A traveling event visited eight malls in the top seven box office cities. Disney held a red carpet marketing event in Shanghai with writer-director Rian Johnson and star Daisy Ridley. It established marketing tie-ins with Pepsi, Samsung, Renault, Alibaba and its Youku streaming platform. It placed multiple Last Jedi posters in nearly every cinema across the country, and ran The Last Jedi’s trailer before almost all the movies that played in December, including the blockbuster hits Youth and Ex-file: Revenge of the Exes.

Indeed, every moviegoer in China was aware of The Last Jedi’s arrival. Most of them simply didn’t care.

You can read the excuses they pulled out of their ass on the link above.

Meanwhile, Forbes also reports:

'Last Jedi' Has Set Its First Box Office Record: Biggest Ever Sequel-To-Sequel Plunge

X-Men: First Class. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. Jurassic Park: The Lost World. Ice Age: Collision Course. Transformers: The Last Knight.

These movies are among the biggest losers in Hollywood history, record holders for global box office mediocrity. They were all sequel films that made hundreds of millions of dollars less in worldwide theatrical revenue than their immediate predecessors in their respective franchises.

But now, one sequel rules them all.

That sequel is Disney/Lucasfilm’s current release Star Wars: The Last Jedi. With China now clearly a huge bust for the picture, $1.4 billion in global receipts is a pipe dream, and even $1.3 billion might be a stretch. Which means Episode VIII: The Last Jedi will earn at least $700 million less in global box office revenue, and probably closer to $800 million less, than the $2.07 billion total of Episode VII: The Force Awakens. That’s easily a $100 million bigger drop than the previous record holder, Transformers: The Last Knight, which collected $609 million less than Transformers 4's 2014 total of $1.1 billion. The Last Jedi is the new all-time champion of sequel collapses.

The Last Jedi’s apologists have claimed that it’s natural and proper that the film would earn less than The Force Awakens, that this is how things always go with big sequels. But that’s simply not true. Among the nearly 100 major studio sequels I reviewed, 57% earned more than their predecessor. Even including the 43% of films that earned less than their predecessor, the average sequel earned $83 million more than the film immediately before it in the franchise. If franchise sequels always made less than their preceding pictures, the Hollywood studios would have been out of the sequel game a long time ago.

The apologists also claim that $1.2 or $1.3 billion is a huge total, and that on that point alone, The Last Jedi must be deemed a big success. I can’t deny that $1.3 billion is a lot of money, but the argument is nevertheless still fallacious in my opinion. It’s as if Disney invested a huge amount of money to get Albert Pujols in his prime, and after a 47 home run season, the next year he hit 28. Sure, you could argue that for most players, 28 home runs would be great. But for Albert Pujols in his prime, it stinks.

Disney didn’t pay hundreds of millions for production costs and marketing to make a movie that will earn nearly 40% less than its predecessor.