Absolutely nothing happened, and Other Box Office News.
Well. This is embarrassing. Here I was, all set to begin a re-launch of my US Box Office Reports on the site that has been willing to tolerate my deranged ramblings and draining of their resources for the past six months, bringing you the same verve, insight and poor stand-up that I did on a weekly basis for the last site I did this stuff for… and absolutely nothing happened. There was one new release that was even close to Wide and that’s it. Almost literally nothing happened. Trade outlets are already reporting on this being the worst weekend at the US box office for two years, but, well, I think we all knew that this outcome was inevitable when we all looked at the release schedule and saw this giant void where films are supposed to be. Calling this the worst weekend in years in an alarmed and surprised fashion is like calling a child foolish and in the worst shape of his life after voluntarily choosing to try and jump a 10 mile wide gorge on a unicycle only to fall face first into the thing; duh, why are you surprised at this completely expected outcome?
Eh, anyways, similarly surprising no-one due to its completely expected nature, Guardians of the Galaxy three-peated at the top of the chart with $10 million in ticket sales. Also surprising no-one, the film is now the biggest August release ever, smashing past The Sixth Sense’s prior record of $293 million, has become only the fourth film in the last 10 years to top the charts for four weeks – alongside such company as The Dark Knight, Avatar No Not the Great TV Show the Crappy James Cameron Film, and The Hunger Games – and maintained its position by being the only decent film that’s playing in over 2,000 theatres. Behind that, as it has been for the last several weeks as well as in life itself, we have Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which eased to $6.5 million. Seems that we will be very much getting those sequels after all, the people involved taking the canny “shove it out in a month where there is literally nothing else coming out to give everyone a collective feeling that they have to see it” approach to maximising profits.
The lone new wide-release for this week was The Identical, a faith-based piece of speculative fiction, inexplicably featuring Seth Green in the supporting cast, about what might have happened if non-copyright-infringing Elvis Presley’s twin brother hadn’t died at childbirth and which looks exactly as awful as that sounds. Thankfully for everyone involved, nobody liked the sound of it either and it only made $1.9 million from just under 2,000 screens for 11th place continuing the trend of faith-based movies that don’t explicitly reference religion in their titles (like devout Christians are way too busy to actually do some research about films beyond their titles or something) bombing spectacularly. Also attempting to kick up the vaguest spurts of activity for me to talk about, Forrest Gump received an IMAX re-release for some bizarre reason and a nation collectively dug out their DVDs of it instead; only managing $405,000 from 337 screens. In better news, the documentary Last Days In Vietnam managed to take $30,500 from 2 screens, and the debut feature from Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, God Help The Girl, swindled $12,800 also from 2 screens.
And… yeah, that’s about it. I imagine we’ll have a very similar sort of situation next week, as well, when the only new films are the Idris Elba-starring thriller No Good Deed and Dolphin Tale 2, a sequel to Dolphin Tale 1. No, really, they made a sequel to Dolphin Tale. You know what’s even crazier? Dolphin Tale was actually a box office number 1. Not kidding. So, yeah, the American box office doesn’t get going for another two weeks. Just goes to show you how lucky we Brits got it this weekend, don’t it?
This full list is almost Identical to last week’s. Do you get it? Cos there’s a film called The Identical and the list is basically the same as last week’s. It’s a play on words. We call these things “puns”. Can’t help but notice you’re still not laughing at my Identical pun, so I’ll take this to mean you don’t understand humour in general. You see, “humour” is based on subverting…
Box Office Results: Friday 5th September 2014 – Sunday 7th September 2014
1] Guardians of the Galaxy
$10,160,000 / $294,567,000
All of these accolades that Guardians keeps racking up are thoroughly deserved. Couldn’t have happened to a better movie! Unless said movies were Dawn of the Planet of the Apes or The Raid 2. Cough.
2] Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
$6,500,000 / $174,647,000
This hits the UK two days after my birthday, so thanks for the wonderful belated birthday present, Paramount! How did you know that I wanted an absolutely abysmal-looking movie for my 20th? You shouldn’t have!
3] If I Stay
$5,750,000 / $39,663,000
Think it’s fair to say that this one hasn’t quite caught on in the Fault In Our Stars way that I imagine Warner Bros. and New Line were hoping it would. Still, all it has to do is hang on for another two weeks and it will have outlasted The Fault in Our Stars’ run in the Top 10. Next week will be dead easy, because we’ve already established that nothing is coming out. The week after, maybe not so much.
$5,400,000 / $66,598,000
Look, my jokes may stink, but at least they’re funnier than pretty much the entirety of this movie. OH, SNAP!
5] The November Man
$4,200,000 / $17,870,000
You know, as his post-Bond career keeps trundling along, I’m starting to get the impression that only we Brits know how to use Pierce Brosnan right. I mean, there’s The Ghost Writer, The World’s End, The Love Punch, Mamma Mia!, A Long Way Down… actually, disregard pretty much everything I just said.
6] As Above, So Below
$3,723,000 / $15,576,000
A precipitous 57% drop between weekends. Does this mean that we can finally retire found-footage now? The gimmick has been run into the ground, then run a bit further for good measure and then run a little bit further still. Find something else to abuse for your horror movies!
7] When the Game Stands Tall
$3,700,000 / $23,490,000
I… I got nothing for this one, folks. Not even a decent pun or pithy aside. Sorry to waste your time.
8] The Giver
$3,591,000 / $37,835,000
I couldn’t Giver f*ck about this movie. OOOOOOHHHHHHHH!!!! PUNS!
9] The Hundred-Foot Journey
$3,200,000 / $45,669,000
Saw and reviewed this one at the weekend. It’s OK. I was bored to tears, but I could appreciate the decent craft on display and the film isn’t bad or anything. It is two hours, for some genuinely inexplicable reason, though and I will definitely hold that against it. If you were able to get some enjoyment out of it, good on you, I won’t stop you. And besides, why should you listen to what I think? I put 47 Ronin on my Top 10 Films of 2013 list, tied with My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, no less!
10] Lucy
$1,950,000 / $121,207,000
It’s up to $313 million worldwide, at the moment, and this news pleases me to absolutely no end. It proves that Scarlett Johannson is a full-fledged box office star who can open pretty much anything by herself, it proves that gloriously dumb films that aren’t insultingly so really can find an audience, it proves that female-led films (along with Maleficent, The Hunger Games, Divergent, Frozen and The Fault in Our Stars) do succeed no matter what idiots may think, and it proves that Hollywood will once again not pay one damn iota of attention to all of this, instead continuing to just do what they always do despite this past Summer proving that that may not be the best idea. It’s the little victories, folks, it really is.
Dropped Out: The Expendables III
Callie Petch is the changingman built on shifting sands.
Callie Petch 