Early box office estimates for Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's mutated creature feature Rampage peg the film for a $35 million opening. Ever since his career kicked into high gear when he joined the Fast and Furious franchise with Fast Five in 2011, Johnson has become one of the most bankable stars in the world, thanks in large part to his participation in the Vin Diesel revved up franchise. And while Johnson has headlined his own blockbusters, too, including G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Moana and most recently, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, he's not immune to landing the occasional beached whale, like last summer's action comedy Baywatch.
Clearly that one hiccup in Johnson's immaculate box office record of late hasn't made studios shy away from employing the former WWE star, who has several films on the horizon. Among them are the action adventures Skyscraper, Jungle Cruise, the Fast and Furious spinoff movie featuring his Hobbs and Jason Statham's Shaw; at some point, he'll also put in an appearance as DC's Black Adam, too. But before anything else, Johnson will return to the big screen on April 13 with Rampage, a sci-fi action adventure adapted from the arcade video game of the same name that debuted in the late 1980s.
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According to Variety, early estimates for domestic sales are out for Rampage, and the film is looking at a stateside debut of about $35 million in its opening weekend. The estimates, which the trade calls more "solid" than "spectacular," comes weeks after Warner Bros., which is releasing the film under its New Line Cinema banner, moved the film's release date up a week from April 20 to April 13 after the Disney/Marvel blockbuster-in-the-making Avengers: Infinity War was pushed up a week from its original release of May 4 to April 27.
Certainly those numbers on the outset seem tepid for a tentpole movie starring someone the caliber of Johnson, especially in comparison to the opening of such such recent monster hits at Black Panther, which roared out of the gate with a haul of $242 million in its four-day President's Day weekend opening frame. In fact, the projected domestic opening for Rampage even falls short of the first three-day frames of Johnson's past hits like San Andreas ($54.5 million) or Moana ($56.6 million), and is more on par with Central Intelligence ($35.5), his buddy comedy with Kevin Hart.
Despite those comparisons, it's unlikely that Warner Bros. is panicking at the $35 million projection just yet. After all, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle opened with $36.1 million Christmas weekend, and in a miraculous turn of events, stormed on to earn $400.6 million domestically and $541.3 overseas for global tally of nearly $942 million.
While it's highly unlikely that Rampage will approach the final take of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, it will be interesting to see where the film ends up financially among Johnson's other action genre pictures. At first blush it appears it's going to be an uphill battle for Rampage, with only a two-week cushion between the film and Infinity War. Of course, Johnson has faced those seemingly insurmountable odds before (remember how Jumanji quickly built up enough steam to pass Star Wars: The Last Jedi?), so if Rampage gets some legs, the actor has proven before that anything is possible.
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Source: Variety
