The Biggest Box Office Surprises of 2018

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That Solo WW total still boggles my mind

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It's one of those surprising but not surprising results. It's a surprise that a SW film would ever do so poorly while at the same time not a surprise at all after the reaction to TLJ.

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That Solo WW total still boggles my mind

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If it had come out at any point before TLJ I think he would have done much, much better, but people have been SW fatigued I'd argue.

Agreed, but I was still expecting well over 500 million. Props to fans who managed to stay away and send a message to Disney. I didn't think that would happen.

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‘Crazy Rich Asians’ Keeps Going and Going

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This was my favorite surprise of 2018. I thought this movie was going to be bad, and it was one of my favorite movie going experiences in a long time.

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Agreed, but I was still expecting well over 500 million. Props to fans who managed to stay away and send a message to Disney. I didn't think that would happen.

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I agree that I didn't think it would happen either. I won't give props to people for staying away, because they missed a very good and entertaining movie. But I certainly thought it would make bank regardless. And while nearly $400 million could be considered bank, I figured it would make almost double that at least.

As for the list in the OP, the only ones I'd consider relative surprises for me are Black Panther outperforming A:IW domestically and Venom outgrossing WW. I have yet to see either Venom or WW, but I remember hearing mostly good things about WW and mostly bad things about Venom (as well as me thinking the trailers for it looked awful anyway).

The others on the list range from "Eh, that's almost something" to "nothing at all" for me.

LINK

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Hollywood summer hit “Crazy Rich Asians” will be lucky to score more than $1 million in its opening weekend in China.

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“The plot is passable, the quality of the production is also fine, but I still wanted to vomit a bit,” one Chinese user wrote Sunday on major review platform Douban, where the film has a middling 6.2 out of 10 rating – mostly from people who saw the film months ago. “So Chinese people in the eyes of Europeans and Americans are just about clans, extravagant snobbery, a blind sense of superiority, and stubbornly clinging to outdated rules and ideas?”

Another user dismissed it by saying it pandered to hot-button U.S. issues of ethnic identity and inclusion without depicting anything that felt recognizably Chinese to mainlanders: “Well, guess it keeps the Americans watching it happy.”

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Chinese people hated an American movie made to specifically pander to them.

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Yet, she still runs things and Johnson is still on track for his trilogy.

Good work with the "boycott."

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hope that wasn't directed at me. i'm not a boycotter or a KK sky screamer. at least i don't publicly make a spectacle of it.

what i mean was i feel Solo took the brunt of people's disdain for tLJ. you can dismiss the opinions here, but there's no other good reason for a SW movie to fail that spectacularly.

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i feel so bad for this movie. it was fun, not SJWy and a decent contained story. i want to give Ron Howard a hug and say "it's not you, it's Kathleen Kennedy."

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Exactly how I feel. The movie itself was good. However, I only went because my daughter wanted to see it real bad. Personally, I don't want to see a Han Solo movie that isn't Harrison Ford.

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The point is that all this crying and bitching appears to have been for nothing.

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The crying and bitching does nothing. The loss in audience does. Currently, at the very least, they've decided to keep their releases to 1 year apart. I don't think that's the last of it. For example, ESPN took some time to make changes as well even though people saw this coming years ago when they started getting political.

No and yes.

ETA: To elaborate, KK is a good executive. RJ had no business getting the keys to a major franchise.