After wavering in the $75-80 million range, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” looks like it will settle at an estimated $77 million haul for the four-day weekend.
That amounts to a 15.5 percent drop from the three-day, $90 million opening for the last “Pirates” movie, “On Stranger Tides.” It also falls short of the $79.8 million four-day total for last year’s No. 1 film, “X-Men: Apocalypse.” It’s another sign that franchise fatigue is taking its toll on this series…but only in America.
Overseas, the film has made over $200 million, including an estimated three-day total of $67.8 million in China. That number is expected to keep going up over the next couple of days, as the country’s Dragon Boat Festival will push the film past the $70 million that “Stranger Tides” made during its entire Chinese run.
In second place is “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” which passed both the domestic and global totals of the first “Guardians film on Sunday with $780 million worldwide and $333 million of that from the States. For its fourth weekend, it has an estimated four-day total of $25.1 million. Combined with the $500 million from “Beauty and the Beast,” Disney is now the first studio to gross $1 billion domestically in 2017.
In third is Paramount/Skydance’s “Baywatch,” which fell hard with just a four-day total of $23 million. It needed the extra day of screenings from its Thursday release to pass “Guardians”‘ four-day weekend total, with a five-day estimated cume of $27.6 million. Against a budget of around $69 million before P&A, “Baywatch” will not become the summer comedy hit Paramount was hoping for and will now look to overseas sales starting next weekend to stay out of the red.
In fourth is Fox’s “Alien: Covenant,” which saw its three-day total take a steep 70 percent hit from its $36 million opening, showing that there may not be a lot of interest in another “Alien” film beyond its devoted fanbase. That film now has a four-day total of $13.3 million. Warner Bros. completes the top five with “Everything, Everything,” which made $7.6 million this Memorial Day weekend.