Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a “reboot,” whatever that means, of a 1995 Robin Williams movie about kids magically transported inside the world of a board game. Sony Studios knew that the new Jumanji was likely to be a hit from the reaction of preview audiences, but no one expected it would make about as much in its third and fourth weekends as it made in its first ($36 million). That almost never happens. And nobody thought it would make $350 million at the domestic box office—a milestone it will almost certainly reach and even exceed.
The Greatest Showman is an old-fashioned full-scale musical of the sort they stopped making in the 1960s (and for good reason), ostensibly about P. T. Barnum and the creation of American show business. It opened disastrously, with a first-weekend take of $8.8 million. But then The Greatest Showman just chugged along, grossing between $4 and $6 million a day from Christmas through New Year’s, dipping down near a $1-million take during weekdays before rising again to $5 million a day on weekends. The Greatest Showman came close to the $100-million mark this weekend and will likely top out around $150 million in the United States. It’s not a blockbuster, as Jumanji is, but this indifferently reviewed picture has done so much better than anyone expected, it has to be considered a triumph against the odds.
These two movies have three things in common. First, they have appeal across various demographics—little kids can attend them, but since they weren’t made specifically for little kids, their older tween and teen siblings have been willing to see them as well. Second, they have the kind of star power that attracts the millennial males who are the key to box-office success—the superhero Hugh Jackman plays The Greatest Showman, while the action dynamo Dwayne Johnson and the comedian Kevin Hart topline Jumanji.
But other movies have shared all these qualities and haven’t broken through. No, the key to the success of Jumanji and The Greatest Showman is the ambergris of show business, the rarest and most valuable of harvested byproducts—word of mouth. We know these movies are prevailing through word of mouth because of the way their box-office numbers hold steady over time; other hit movies reach their highs in the first five days and then drop by around 50 percent by their second weekend. This means that they reach their target audience early and pretty much stick to it. A word-of-mouth movie hits its target audience and then transcends it as the original targets praise it to the non-targets and get them interested.
Usually, people find out about movies from marketing or reviews. But in the end, all an enormously expensive promotional campaign that sometimes spends as much or more than the movie cost to make can do is raise awareness of a film’s existence. Only positive word of mouth can launch it into the box office stratosphere. And rapturous reviews can also work to bring a certain type of moviegoer to the theater opening weekend, but if they oversell the movie or have been published in bad faith (because the reviewer wants to make a political point or is brown-nosing a director or writer) they can actually have the effect of angering the viewer and causing him to badmouth the film in question. Overpraise can lead to the deadliest force of all—bad word of mouth.
There is no substitute for good word of mouth. It is a market emanation similar to the invisible hand. It circulates quietly and quickly in such a way that people who haven’t even directly heard it start saying to themselves, “That movie Jumanji . . . it looks kind of fun, maybe we should try it.”
So what is it about Jumanji and The Greatest Showman that has produced such enthusiasm in audiences? In the case of Jumanji, it’s simply that the movie is just so much fun—an unexpected comedy-adventure in which the four lead actors play winningly against type. (Dwayne Johnson’s character is a 14-year-old nerdy loser who has been transformed into . . . Dwayne Johnson.) Its charm provides a stark contrast to the creepy and unpleasant original; indeed, once people started reporting that it was a far more playful and upbeat take, that might have helped accelerate its acceptance.
The Greatest Showman just demonstrates the continuing affection audiences have for musicals. The only two original movie musicals made in Hollywood in the past two decades are this one and La La Land, and the wildly positive audience response to them both suggests the industry’s wise men are pretty stupid to have given up on this genre. I’d risk saying moviegoers like them so much they like The Greatest Showman even though its score is mostly lousy and its portrayal of a gloriously woke 19th century would be laughable if the songs and dialogue weren’t so patently and consciously anachronistic.
Still, it’s nice to see audiences deciding for themselves what to see rather than serving as automata in service of whatever franchise Disney is putting in front of them this week.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic.
