The overall box office was down about 7.3% from the same weekend last year when Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk debuted with $50.6 million. Despite modest drops over the past two weekends, the domestic movie market in 2018 is still running 8.4% ahead of last year, and 8.1% ahead of 2016’s record pace. It will be interesting to see if this lead will be maintained through the rest of the year.
This week’s surprise winner was Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer 2, which is based on the old CBS series, and stars Denzel Washington as a retired government agent, who uses his special skills and training to take down particularly vicious bad guys. The Equalizer franchise is built on serious revenge and “R” rated violence, as is the case with other modern “R” rated action series like the John Wick series or to an extent, the more fanciful Kingsmen movies. The timing might be right for a heavy duty action film, but there is no denying that Denzel Washington’s star power and Fuqua’s no-nonsense staging have developed a following for the franchise.
Few expected The Equalizer 2 to win the weekend, but it did with an estimated $35.85 million, a slightly better bow (sans inflation) than its predecessor, which opened with $34.1 million in 2014. The EQ2 also earned a better CinemaScore from audiences (an “A” versus an “A-“) than the original, though it may well have a tough time matching the first EQ’s $101.5 million domestic total, largely because of the competition it will face for its predominantly male audiences starting next weekend with the debut of the well-reviewed and “buzzy” Mission Impossible: Fallout.
Just how masculine was the audience for EQ2? One reporting service put it at 60% male, while another said 58%, but either way it represents a change in demographics from the first film, which was just 52% male. This concentrated demographic appeal could prove a bit problematic over the next few weeks, given increasing competition for male viewers. Still, the EQ2 is off to a solid start, and will likely be able to make up for any domestic shortfall overseas, where it is running 30% ahead of the first film in the 11 markets in which it has debuted.
The movie that was supposed to win this weekend, Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again!, proved to be a bit front-loaded. After Friday analysts were expecting a $40 million debut, but the film tailed off on Saturday and the studio now estimates that it will earn $34.38 million, which is almost $7 million better than the original Mamma Mia earned in 2008. This is the #4 opening for a musical in box office history (not adjusting for inflation), and Here We Go Again will have much less competition for its female audience over the rest of the summer---and that matters because females made up a whopping 83% of the opening weekend audience.
|
Weekend Box Office (Studio Estimates): July 20-22, 2018 |
||||||
|
Film |
Weekend Gross |
Screens |
Avg./Screen |
Total Gross |
Wk# |
|
|
1 |
The Equalizer 2 |
$35,825,000 |
3,388 |
$10,574 |
$35,825,000 |
1 |
|
2 |
Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! |
$34,380,000 |
3,317 |
$10,365 |
$34,380,000 |
1 |
|
3 |
Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation |
$23,150,000 |
4,267 |
$5,425 |
$91,089,268 |
2 |
|
4 |
Ant-Man and the Wasp |
$16,126,000 |
3,778 |
$4,268 |
$164,624,292 |
3 |
|
5 |
Incredibles 2 |
$11,520,000 |
3,164 |
$3,641 |
$557,335,440 |
6 |
|
6 |
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom |
$11,005,000 |
3,381 |
$3,255 |
$383,904,505 |
5 |
|
7 |
Skyscraper |
$10,960,000 |
3,822 |
$2,868 |
$46,749,120 |
2 |
|
8 |
The First Purge |
$4,980,000 |
2,331 |
$2,136 |
$60,191,365 |
3 |
|
9 |
Unfriended: Dark Web |
$3,495,000 |
1,546 |
$2,261 |
$3,495,000 |
1 |
|
10 |
Sorry to Bother You |
$2,823,000 |
1,050 |
$2,689 |
$10,252,204 |
3 |
Just as was the case with Book Club in May and Ocean’s 8 in June, Mamma Mia 2 is demonstrating that the female audience has been underserved by Hollywood, especially during the blockbuster-heavy summer season, and that money can be made by crafting films that appeal to women, and releasing them during the summer when the films, for the most part, just have to compete with male-targeting action fare and bombastic blockbusters.
Last week’s box office winner, Hotel Transylvania 3, slipped just 47.5% as it earned $23.3 million to bring its 10-day domestic cumulative to $91 million. The big question is how the debut of Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, which opens next weekend, will affect Hotel Transylvania 3 here in the domestic market? The animated feature is doing even better overseas where it has earned $115.6 million, paving the way for a Hotel Transylvania 4.
Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man and the Wasp just keep chugging along. In its third weekend of release, it dropped just 44.6% as it earned $16.1 million to bring its domestic total to $165 million. Overseas it has earned almost $189 million, even though it hasn’t opened in about 44% of the world’s movie marketplace.
The final film in the top five was another Disney release, Pixar’s Incredibles 2, which earned $11.5 million in its sixth weekend in theaters, bringing its domestic total to a record-setting (for an animated feature) $557.3 million. Overseas the film has opened in about 75% of the world’s marketplaces and has earned $383.1 million for a global haul of $940 million. Incredibles 2 is likely to become the fourth film of 2018 to surpass the $1 billion mark worldwide (there were just four such films in all of 2017).
While Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom had no problem with competition from the EQ2, as it dropped just 32.1%, earning $11 million in its fifth weekend of release, the Dwayne Johnson-starring Skyscraper dropped 56% in its second weekend. This pricy ($125 million) original action movie will have to do well overseas to break even.
At the other end of the production scale, the micro-budgeted found footage horror film Unfriended: Dark Web opened weakly with $3.5 million, a disappointment of sorts, but with a production cost of under a million, no one is going to lose money on this film.
Be sure to check back here next weekend to see if the sixth film in the Mission Impossible franchise, Mission Impossible: Fallout, which has a superb 96% positive rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, will be able to break Mission Impossible II’s franchise record debut of $57.8 million as it bows in over 4,000 theaters, and if the DC/Warner Bros. Animation creation Teen Titans Go! can make the transition from the small screen to over 3,000 theaters.
