Weekend Wrap-Up

By Tim Briody

September 1, 2019

She's honestly too cool for this movie.

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Oh, Labor Day weekend. While it's not quite as depressing as The Void, the weekend (or two) after Thanksgiving, it's traditionally one of the worst weekends of the box office year.

Historical bad box office weekends are of course self-fulfilling prophecies; if there's something people want to see, they'd see it. If you put Avengers: Endgame out this weekend, it'd still make $300 million. But the studios recognize that it's the last hurrah for summer for many folks before school begins again and thus choose not to release anything of value.

That's especially true this weekend, as the two new releases, Don't Let Go (which at least had a puncher's chance at making the top ten) places 14th for the weekend, while Bennett's War lands in 22nd place. Thus, it's an entire top ten of holdovers for the first time since the weekend of December 7th-9th of last year, when we were in the second weekend of The Void.

Angel Has Fallen wins a second weekend at the top, more or less by default, with $11.5 million for the weekend, down 46% from its opening. It's got $40.6 million so far. That may or may not be its production budget, depending on various sources, so it needs a boost overseas to make sure it ends up as profitable as both Olympus and London Has Fallen. Those numbers haven't kicked in yet.

Good Boys holds pretty well, adding $9.1 million and giving it $56.1 million in three weekends. The R-rated comedy starring people too young to actually see it (which was a bit they used to advertise it) only cost $20 million to make, and is a late summer hit.

The Lion King gets one last hurrah, dropping just 17% in its seventh weekend with $6.7 million and a massive $520.9 million to date. Just Disney doing Disney things, as next up in the live action department is October's Maleficent sequel.




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Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw earns $6.2 million (down 22%) in its fifth weekend, giving it a solid $157 million to date. Worldwide, after China kicked in some big numbers last weekend, it's got $647 million. Not a bad return as we wait for Fast & Furious 9 next Memorial Day.

Faith based entry Overcomer earns $5.7 million (down 30%) and has $17.2 million in two weekends. Much like horror films, plenty of faith based movies are made on the cheap, as this one only cost $5 million. Sony will be very satisfied with their return on this one.

Ready or Not also slips 40% to $5.6 million and $20 million in two weekends. The darkly comedic take on the Most Dangerous Game (Knife Monopoly?) is something I think can definitely end up popular on the streaming sites.

Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark earns $5 million (down 15%) and has $57.6 million in four weekends. Maybe they can turn it into a franchise, as there are actually multiple books in the series.

Still a holdover, but expanding back into wide release is Spider-Man: Far From Home, earning $4.2 million and bringing it to $384.7 million in nine weekends. I suppose the plan by Sony here was to get it closer to $400 million (gotta get that MCU money while they can?), but I wasn't aware of the big re-release (3,162 theaters!) until deep into the weekend, so they didn't really promote it enough.

Dora and the Lost City of Gold gets to just about the $50 million mark with $4.1 million and $49.5 million in four weekends. If they hadn't waited so long to get a live action version made, this would be a venerable movie franchise (on its third or fourth Dora) still making decent money.

Disappointing sequel The Angry Birds Movie 2 wraps up things this weekend, with $4.1 million and $33.9 million in three weekends. We're still not quite at the amount that the first movie opened to back in 2016 ($38.1 million) if you want to know how bad this performance has been.

Your top 12 films this weekend earned a miserable $69.5 million. That's no match for last year's $80.2 million when Crazy Rich Asians led for a third weekend with $21.9 million.

Things get better as next weekend we get the long awaited sequel IT: Chapter 2, attempting to recapture the box office magic when the last one earned $123.4 million.


Top Ten for Weekend of August 30-September 1, 2019
Rank
Film
Distributor
Estimated
Gross ($)
Weekly Change
Cumulative
Gross ($)
1 Angel Has Fallen Lionsgate 11.5 -46% 40.6
2 Good Boys Universal 9.1 -21% 56.1
3 The Lion King Walt Disney 6.7 -17% 520.9
4 Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw Universal 6.2 -22% 157.0
5 Overcomer Sony Pictures 5.7 -30% 17.2
6 Ready or Not Fox Searchlight 5.6 -30% 20.0
7 Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark CBS Films 5.0 -15% 57.6
8 Spider-Man: Far From Home Sony Pictures 4.2 +153% 384.7
9 Dora and the Lost City of Gold Paramount 4.1 -22% 49.5
10 The Angry Birds Movie 2 Sony Pictures 4.1 -36% 33.9
Box office data supplied by Exhibitor Relations

     


 
 

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