beauty and the beast

The Disney+ show was supposed to begin production later this year.

The eight-episode show will focus on Gaston and LeFou.

Ever wanted to know more about Gaston and LeFou?

Not only has the movie already crossed $1 billion worldwide after just three weeks in theaters, it’s not the #1 movie of 2017.

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.

This November, the princesses from Arendelle and their little snowman friend will return to theaters in a new animated short playing in front of Pixar’s Coco. Olaf’s Frozen Adventure will follow the quirky beach-loving snowman as he helps his friends Elsa and Anna celebrate the holiday season in Arendelle since the princesses reunited. Frozen has been such a smash success for Disney that it’s considered its own brand within the Disney Princesses world, and with the release of Olaf’s Frozen Adventure in November, Hasbro intends to make sure your kids have plenty of newly costumed Elsas, Annas, Olafs, and Kristoffs.

When special effects do their job, they create an illusion so seamless we forget we’re looking at something that’s not really there. The Beast in Disney’s hit live-action retelling of Beauty and the Beast is such an impressive work of motion-capture technology that it can be easy to overlook the amount of effort, energy, and looking incredibly stupid in a giant gray unitard required to turn Dan Stevens into a feral creature.

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 week devoid of any major releases, we still saw some major changes at the box office, with familiar faces like Kong: Skull Island, Power Rangers, and Get Out (RIP) all falling from the Top 10 in favor of new releases or aggressively expanding art films. Of course, not everything was different; if you read these box office reports every weekend, I’ll bet you can name the top three movies (in order) with minimal effort. Here’s the weekend box office projections as of Sunday afternoon:

Certain as the sun, this Belle figure from Good Smile will turn any dusty shelf into a charming display full of Disney magic.

Audiences don’t turn their back on family. That’s the lesson to be learned from this past weekend, anyways, when The Fate of the Furious proved that this is one franchise showing no signs of slowing down. It was never a question of whether The Fate of the Furious would take the top spot this weekend, but even the most optimistic of projections couldn’t have expected the global domination that this movie undertook. Here’s the box office estimates as of Sunday afternoon: