“Jurassic World Rebirth” has already raked in $318 million at the international box office, less than a week after its theatrical release – which officially makes Scarlett Johansson the highest-grossing film lead in Hollywood.
The latest in the dinosaur-centric franchise, “Jurassic World Rebirth” features Johansson playing a mercenary hired to guard a paleontologist attempting to rescue dino-DNA from the facility featured in “Jurassic Park,” the first installment of the series.
It had been a longtime dream of hers to act in one of the franchise’s films. “I’ve been trying to get into this franchise in any possible way for over 10 years,” Johansson told Entertainment Weekly when her casting was announced. “I’m like, ‘I’ll die in the first five minutes! I can get eaten by whatever! I’ll do the craft service!’ The fact that it’s happened in this way, at this time, just is actually unbelievable. I can’t believe it.”
Now, not only is she one of the stars of a “Jurassic” film – she’s also a record-breaking earner.
Movies featuring Johansson, who has also helmed numerous comic-book offerings and garnered several Oscar nominations over the course of her career, have amassed a collective sum of $14.8 billion. Most of the bank-breaker movies involve her turn as Black Widow, a member of Marvel’s Avengers, though her performances in children’s animated musical “Sing” and cerebral thriller “Lucy” also contributed to the total.
She’s even out-earning her male Marvel co-stars. The record was previously held by Samuel L. Jackson, with Robert Downey, Jr. not far behind him.
It’s a heartening continuation of the trend of women leading box-office smashes – the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s 2024 report found that the on-screen leading roles in last year’s top-grossing movies were evenly divided between female and male actors. “This is the first time we can say that gender equality has been reached in top-grossing films,” Dr. Stacy L. Smith, the study’s lead researcher, told The Wrap.
Perhaps Johansson will help keep the trend alive.
