“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,”1 the most recent entry in an ongoing war documentary series that has gripped the nation for decades, pulled in an impressive $155 million at the North American box office this past weekend.
So, how does that stack up? And what does it mean for the movie’s future grosses? Making box-office predictions is a frivolous and quixotic venture, so we’re not going to try it. But benchmarking a movie and comparing it to similar ones? Hell, why not.
After pulling data from The Numbers, a box-office database and adjusting for inflation, I figured out which previous movies had the closest-to-$155 million opening weekends. The data is reliable back to 1995, and since then, “Rogue One” has had something like the 28th-best opening weekend, just behind classic holiday movies like “The Passion of the Christ” and just ahead of nerd catnip like “Spider-Man.”
Of those similar box-office performances, the worst-performing of the batch — “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2” — made about $317 million in North America (in 2016 dollars) when all was said and done, while the best-performing — “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” — made around $478 million. So, that’s a pretty wide range of possibilities. The median movie made $396 million, not a bad haul at all. That’s almost enough to justify a sequel, and golly I wonder what’s going to happen with that Death Star and those stolen plans.
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