Star Wars: Solo Passes Infinity War's Opening at Box Office

Solo: A Star Wars Story's worldwide box office total finally passed the domestic opening weekend for Avengers: Infinity War... after 10 days in theaters. Plagued by production issues, major changes, and vague marketing, the latest from Disney and Lucasfilm's revival of the iconic franchise is well on its way to becoming, by far, the least commercially successful of the entire franchise. That's despite garnering decent reviews from critics and positive word-of-mouth from audiences.

Even the polarizing Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the latest proper Star Wars film, was still a huge box office success with over $1.3 billion worldwide. The first standalone Star Wars anthology movie, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, earned over $1 billion globally. However, it seems that Solo: A Star Wars Story isn't going to come close to either of them in that regard. And its shockingly slow pace all around the world at the box office, as compared to Infinity War's hot start, illustrates how poorly the movie is performing - especially by Star Wars standards.

According to Box Office Mojo, Solo: A Star Wars Story finished its second weekend at $264.2 million worldwide. That (finally) passes the $257 million that Avengers: Infinity War made in its first weekend in the U.S. alone. Solo is well behind the $286 million that Rogue One earned in its first two weekends domestically. A big reason for that is because Solo isn't performing well at home. In the U.S., Solo grossed under $30 million in its second weekend, which includes a 77 percent Friday-to-Friday drop. And it's clearly not faring much better in foreign markets, either; its $30.3 million international gross this weekend shows just how poorly the film is doing globally.

Alden Ehrenreich a Han and Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca in Solo A Star Wars Story

Solo: A Star Wars Story's disappointment at the worldwide box office - along with its reported $250 million production budget - points to a Star Wars film that could, stunningly, fail to break even when all is said and done. By comparison, Infinity War cost over $300 million to make and yet could cross the $2 billion threshold worldwide before it bows out of theaters.

Unfortunately for Lucasfilm and director Ron Howard, the discussion surrounding Solo moving forward will be what went wrong. There are many reasons for why Solo: A Star Wars Story isn't doing well commercially. The movie's production problems, headlined by the director switch from Phil Lord & Chris Miller to Howard, made it feel doomed from the start. And its oddly late marketing push certainly didn't inspire confidence, either. In light of the fact that Disney's first three Star Wars movies topped $1 billion worldwide, it's been an astonishing drop-off for Solo, to say the least.

Fair or not, Infinity War will be the benchmark to which every major release will be compared in 2018. Deadpool 2 doesn't look nearly as bad, nearing the $600 million worldwide mark as it blows by Solo, especially overseas. It remains to be seen what Disney and Lucasfilm decide to do from here, but there's not likely to be much scaling back for perhaps the most famous franchise in Hollywood. But whatever Disney does, Solo: A Star Wars Story has now put the studios in a position where J.J. Abrams' Star Wars: Episode IX needs to be a major bounce-back effort.