The dinos are back.
Jurassic World Dominion devoured $59.6 million at the Friday box office for a projected domestic debut of $142 million. At this pace, the third and final installment in the Jurassic World trilogy will finish Sunday with a global total of $386 million.
The Universal and Amblin movie will easily win the box office race as audience sensation Top Gun: Maverick falls to No. 2 in its third weekend. Top Gun 2 continues to overperform and should earn a rousing $50 million this session as it approaches the $400 million mark domestically.
Jurassic World Dominion is coming in behind 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom ($148 million) and 2015’s Jurassic World ($208.8 million), but it is still one of the biggest openings of the pandemic era.
Critics ravaged the film, but audiences disagree, giving it an A- CinemaScore and solid exits on PostTrak. Jurassic World Dominion presently has a 34 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, the lowest of any title in the iconic dino series.
One advantage is that Dominion is taking away Imax and premium large format screens from Top Gun: Maverick. Another advantage: Actors Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neill and BD Wong are reuniting for the first time since starring in director Steven Spielberg’s first Jurassic Park (1993).
Director and Jurassic World architect Colin Trevorrow, after sitting out Fallen Kingdom, returns to helm Jurassic World Dominion, which is the final title in the trilogy that has been anchored by actors Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard.
This time out, the dinosaurs live — and hunt — alongside humans all over the world. Jurassic World Dominion boasts never-seen dinosaurs and new visual effects.
Overseas, the movie began opening in a raft of additional markets this week for a foreign tally of $95.1 million through Friday (it first launched last weekend in select territories).
Dominion is one of the few Hollywood tentpoles to get a release date in China, where it posted an opening day gross of $15 million. While that’s behind Fallen Kingdom, the movie will easily rank as the biggest Hollywood opening in China this year, topping The Batman’s lackluster $12.1 million China debut in March. (Some of 2022’s top Hollywood earners like Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick and Marvel’s Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness have been denied China releases by Beijing regulators due to political reasons.)
Dominion is contending with a far more depressed China film market, however. Although many urban centers, including Shanghai, are emerging from recent, economically damaging COVID lockdowns, approximately 23 percent of cinemas across the country remain closed as a public health precaution and consumer activity continues to be suppressed.