Wonder Woman and IT made a huge impression at the box office this year, but both failed to overtake 2017’s biggest hit: Beauty and the Beast. Released back in March, Disney’s blockbuster reimagining of its animated classic is still the highest-grossing film of the year, and as we wade into the prestigious waters of awards season, the studio is making sure that voters don’t forget about it.
Although the tale (as old as tiiiime) of Beauty and the Beast is a self-contained one with no existing basis for continuation, that hasn’t stopped Disney from considering the possibilities of a follow-up to their recent live-action reimagining — especially now that it’s earned over $1 billion at the box office, breaking a previous record held by the seemingly untouchable Star Wars. But while Disney has been mulling a potential spinoff or prequel, Emma Watson would rather see a direct sequel, and she’s already come up with a good starting point.
This past weekend, a seismic shift in box-office history took place and went largely unnoticed. The writing was on the wall for Star Wars’ legacy in the all-time top 10 highest-earning films, as noted on Reddit prior to the start of this past weekend. Box-office behemoth Beauty and the Beast continued to generate healthy grosses in its fifth weekend of release, ending the weekend with a princely (or should I say, princessly!) sum of $471.1 million. This gave the film a slight edge of the next-most-lucrative film on the list, which just so happened to be George Lucas’ original space opus. Star Wars and its lifetime gross of $461 million have now slid down to the #11 spot.
In a parallel universe where Paramount Pictures doesn’t alienate its fanbase, we might be talking about Ghost in the Shell as the big winner of this weekend and the de facto start of a new wave of Japanese Hollywood adaptations. Instead, DreamWorks Animation and The Boss Baby blew up the box office, no doubt delighting a handful of DreamWorks executives who watched the Ghost in the Shell controversy unfold with glasses of champagne in hand. After all, nobody’s going to boycott a movie about a baby who wears a suit.
After several weeks of limited movement, a handful of new releases prompted a pretty thorough shakeup of the Box Office Top 10. While Beauty and the Beast continued its unstoppable assault on the domestic box office, we also said hello this weekend to three new movies and goodbye to a handful of old favorites from the first few months of the year. Let’s start with the estimated numbers as of Sunday afternoon.
Gaston and Le Fou’s friendship is many things: Complicated and co-dependent, kind of weird, and definitely one of the greatest antagonist pairings in Disney history. It’s easy to see why they’re friends, but it’s difficult to imagine how this odd couple came together in the first place. That’s where this new claymation short film comes in. A collaborative effort between Disney, Tongal and Young Storytellers, the short — created by a 12-year-old boy — imagines how Gaston met Le Fou, and gives us a little bonus “Gaston” song action.
From the good—Emma Watson and the music—to the beastly—LeFou's 'gay moment' joke and the jarring CGI objects, one lifelong Disney fan reviews 2017's 'Beauty and the Beast.'