The Disney and Lucasfilm juggernaut is getting beaten badly by local comedy ‘The Ex-File 3,’ which opened in China a week ago.
Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi is off to an inauspicious start in China, its final major box-office test.
The prior two Star Wars films underperformed in China, but the early results for The Last Jedi, which finally debuted locally on Friday, look even worse than expected.
The film earned $560,000 (3.65 million RMB) in midnight previews, well behind Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ $2.5 million (16 million RMB) previews score — and way behind The Fate of the Furious’ record $8.7 million preview total (60 million RMB) in 2017.
Worse still, Friday’s early box-office results have The Last Jedi clearly losing to local comedy The Ex-File 3: The Return of the Exes. As of 4:30 p.m., Beijing time, The Last Jedi had earned approximately $5 million (33 million RMB) compared to Ex-Files 3’s $11.6 million (75 million RMB), according to data from mobile ticketing service Maoyan.
The results came despite The Last Jedi getting substantially more screens — approximately a 35.6 percent share of all Chinese screens — compared to Ex-File’s 32.3 percent (again, as of 4:30 p.m. Friday). And adding insult to injury: Ex-File opened in China a full week ago.
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