Oh boy. We Malaysians really do love ourselves some of that delicious Dwayne Johnson action. A week ahead of its North American premiere, Jumanji: The Next Level raked in a staggering RM19 million over its first four days of release, breaking a whole bunch of December records at the Malaysian box office, and proving once again that The Rock is a sure thing.
The holiday tentpole – which also stars Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, and Jack Black – now lays claim to having the nation’s biggest single trading Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in December of all time. This also means that it holds the Malaysian record for the biggest opening weekend in December of all time.
The sequel didn’t open as well in China as it’s 2017 predecessor – nabbing just US$25.3 million compared to Welcome to the Jungle’s US$39 million. It did, however, do gangbusters over here in South East Asia where The Next Level, as a whole, opened 47% better than Jungle. The movie also scored Malaysia’s 2nd biggest opening of the year behind Avengers: Endgame.
There are very few certainties when it comes to box office performance here in Malaysia (horror, action, those Fast and Furious movies) but you can usually count on anything with The Rock in it to make a good showing. More so when it’s a four quadrant movie like The Next Level.
On Sony’s part, they did well to release the movie here a whole fortnight before Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker sucks all of the oxygen out of the room. Then again, while Star Wars may dominate the discourse, it has traditionally performed poorly in Malaysian cinemas. Welcome to the Jungle absolutely decimated The Last Jedi, taking a total of US$14.1 million while Star Wars sputtered with just US$3.7 million.
What would be interesting to observe, however, is whether or not the landmark nature of this next Star Wars movie (being the last one in the saga), has any impact at all on the local moviegoing audience.
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