The home invasion thriller No Good Deed easily topped the weekend box office charts as it earned a robust $24.5 million from just 2,175 theaters.  Fellow newcomer A Dolphin Tale 2, faced with lingering competition for the family audience from Guardians and the live-action TMNT movie, opened at the lower end of expectations with $16.6 million, and the box office was down by double digits once again, dropping 14% behind the same frame last year when horror film Insidious Chapter 2 opened with $40.3 million.
 
Produced for just $13.5 million No Good Deed stars the charismatic Idris Elba and Taraji P. Henson in a pure genre picture that, for some reason (perhaps the Ray Rice incident) Sony withheld from the critics with predictable results--the movie only received a 12% positive rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.  No Good Deed attracted an audience that was 60% female and 41% under thirty, and unlike the critics they gave the film a solid "B+" CInemaScore.  The African-American audience has not been particularly well-served this summer and No Good Deed should be a bit of a wake-up call for Tinseltown--and one would hope that the powers-that-be take note of the drawing power the film’s two leads and provide them with better roles.
 
Second place went to Dolphin Tale 2, whose $16.6 million debut was below that of its predecessor ($19.2 million).  The first Dolphin Tale earned $72 million in the domestic market, a total that is still attainable for its successor.  Dolphin Tale 2, which cost $36 million to produce, attracted an audience that was 63% female and 56% over 25.  The first Dolphin Tale film showed great “legs,” and Dolphin Tale 2, which earned a solid 73% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, also managed to score an "A" CinemaScore (and an "A+" from the film’s key demo, women under 35) could also benefit from a long stay in theaters.
 
Meanwhile Guardians of the Galaxy dropped just 22.2% as it earned an additional $8 million, bringing its 2014-leading total to $305 million.  By this time next week Guardians could be threatening Iron Man 2’s domestic total of $312 million, and surpassing the original Iron Man’s $318 million is also certainly possible.  Overseas, however the story is different with a worldwide total that has finally passed $600 million.  Even though Guardians has earned $100 million more than Spider-Man 2 in the domestic market, it will take a strong performance in China (where it opens October 10) for Guardians to match The Amazing Spider-Man 2’s $708 million worldwide showing.  By far the top comic book movie released in the domestic market this year, Guardians could well end up with the smallest worldwide gross of any superhero movie released this year.
 
The Michael Bay-produced live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film continues to demonstrate the underlying strength of the Turtles property as it declined just 26.2% and earned $4.8 million, bringing its domestic total to $181 million.  Overseas the new TMNT film has now passed $300 million, making the movie one of Paramount’s biggest hits of the year.

Fox’s "R" rated comedy Let’s Be Cops continues to purr right along adding $4.3 million and bringing its total to $73 million, while the other films in the back half of the top ten all suffered modest declines (from modest totals).
 
The Drop, a crime film set in Brooklyn, which is the late James Gandolfini’s last film earned $4.2 million from just 809 theaters as it posted the second best per venue average of any film in the top ten ($5,192).  The Drop, which also stars Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace, will expand to more than 1000 locations next week.
 
Opening outside the top 20 was Atlas Shrugged Part III: Who Is John Galt?, which debuted in 242 theaters and earned just $355,000, demonstrating once again that there is virtually no interest in Ayn Rand’s prolix objectivist musingsl among the mainstream public.  Expect Atlas Shrugged’s total to grow next week--word is, Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan is going to require his staff to see it.
 
Next week should prove to be an interesting one at the box office.  After two weeks with only a couple of modest genre films debuting, there will be a logjam of new films next week with the Liam Neeson crime thriller A Walk Among the Tombstones, Kevin Smith’s Tusk, yet another dystopian YA novel adaptation (The Maze Runner), and the all-star (Tina Fey, Jane Fonda, Jason Bateman) family comedy This Is Where I Leave You all striving to top the charts.
 
--Tom Flinn