'Last Jedi' Has Set Its First Box Office Record: Biggest Ever Sequel-To-Sequel Plunge


X-Men: First Class. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. Jurassic Park: The Lost World. Ice Age: Collision Course. Transformers: The Last Knight.

These movies are among the biggest losers in Hollywood history, record holders for global box office mediocrity. They were all sequel films that made hundreds of millions of dollars less in worldwide theatrical revenue than their immediate predecessor sequels in their respective franchises.

But now, one sequel rules them all.

That sequel is Disney/Lucasfilm’s current release Star Wars: The Last Jedi. With China now clearly a huge bust for the picture, $1.4 billion in global receipts is a pipe dream, and even $1.3 billion might be a stretch. Which means Episode VIII: The Last Jedi will earn at least $700 million less in global box office revenue, and probably closer to $800 million less, than the $2.07 billion total of Episode VII: The Force Awakens (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story may have immediately preceeded Last Jedi, but it is properly classified as a spin-off, not a sequel, so I didn't include it in this analysis). That’s easily a $200 million bigger drop than the previous sequel-to-sequel record holder, Transformers: The Last Knight, which collected nearly $500 million less than Transformers 4's 2014 total of $1.1 billion. The Last Jedi is the new all-time champion of sequel collapses.

The Last Jedi’s apologists have claimed that it’s natural and proper that the film would earn less than The Force Awakens, that this is how things always go with big sequels. But that’s simply not true. Among the nearly 100 major studio sequels I reviewed, 57 percent earned more than their predecessor. Even including the 43 percent of films that earned less than their predecessor, the average sequel earned $83 million more than the film immediately before it in the franchise. If franchise sequels always made less than their preceding pictures, the Hollywood studios would have been out of the sequel game a long time ago.

Pacific Bridge data

The apologists also claim that $1.2 or $1.3 billion is a huge total, and that on that point alone, The Last Jedi must be deemed a big success. I can’t deny that $1.3 billion is a lot of money, but the argument is nevertheless still fallacious in my opinion. It’s as if Disney invested a huge amount of money to get Albert Pujols in his prime, and after a 47 home run season, the next year he hit 28. Sure, you could argue that for most players, 28 home runs would be great. But for Albert Pujols in his prime, it stinks. Disney didn’t pay hundreds of millions for production costs and marketing to make a movie that will earn nearly 40 percent less than its predecessor.

To take this point further, just because a movie generates a big top-line gross doesn't necessarily make it a financial success. Disney spent a huge sum to develop, produce and market The Last Jedi, it committed enormous and costly human resources to it, and gave it the year's most valuable release slot. The studio paid $4 billion for the right to produce Star Wars movies, so the amortization of that purchase applied to The Last Jedi runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. All in, with production costs, marketing costs, studio overhead and IP rights, The Last Jedi's breakeven point is almost certainly among the highest of any movie in Hollywood's history. Will the studio make a profit on that investment? Yes, probably. But will Disney's return on investment justify its expenditure by exceeding or even matching The Last Jedi's cost of capital? Only Disney can answer that question for certain, but I'm skeptical.


Three of those movies killed or severely wounded their franchises. Two of them saw their franchises come back to thrive again. Which way Disney’s Star Wars franchise will go after the Last Jedi debacle is a big open question.

Read More: 4 Key Reasons Why 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' Is A Catastrophic Flop In China

This article has been revised to correct a previous error in the stated box office figures for Transformers: The Last Knight.

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