Sully dropped just 37% in its second weekend as it brought its domestic total to $70.5 million. This Tom Hanks vehicle is in excellent position for an extended run, but it will be hurt by the debut of The Magnificent Seven next week and Deepwater Horizon on September 30.
Second place went Blair Witch, the sequel to the pioneering found-footage horror film The Blair Witch Project, a cult hit that opened in 1999 with just $1.5 million, but went on to earn $140.5 million domestic. Lionsgate conducted a wide-ranging publicity campaign for Blair Witch including a showing at Comic-Con, but in spite of the fact that horror films have been on a roll this summer, the audience’s appetite for deliberately crude, shaky footage punctuated by shocks at things lurch into unsteady picture frame appears to be quite limited. While many analysts were predicting an opening above $20 million for Blair Witch, the film could muster a mere $9.6 million. Don’t worry about the filmmakers however, the movie only cost $5 million to produce (it is likely more was spent to promote this film than to make).
The audience for Blair Witch skewed male (56%) and older with 61% over 25. Unfortunately for Blair Witch’s future prospects, audiences gave the film a horrible “D+” CinemaScore, and the critics weren’t all that generous either, since Blair Witch’s current rating on Rotten Tomatoes is only 37% positive. Given that reaction and the competition from upcoming horror films, Blair Witch will likely end up in the same neighborhood ($26.4 million) as 2000’s hasty, ill-conceived sequel, Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows.
The critics really liked Bridget Jones’s Baby, which currently has a 78% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and many analysts thought the third Bridget Jones film would bring the franchise’s biggest opening, instead with just $8.2 million, it posted the worst debut in franchise history.
However Bridget Jones’s Baby is doing very well internationally, and with a solid “B+” CinemaScore, it is possible that it will hang around long enough to make up for its poor debut, but there is also the possibility that, like Blair Witch, this third Bridget Jones film is a victim of creeping “sequelitis.”
As might be expected the audience for Bridget Jones’s Baby skewed heavily female (79%), and, with 72% over 35, quite a bit older than the typical modern movie audience, which could also mean additional “legs” for the film, since older viewers often avoid opening weekends.
Oliver Stone’s biopic Snowden, which stars Joseph Gordon Leavitt as the controversial leaker of NSA domestic spying secrets, also opened below expectations (though only slightly), and at $8 million, Snowden posted the lowest opening total for any of Stone’s film. The good news is that Snowden earned an “A” CinemaScore from those who saw it. The problem is that audiences in general don’t seem that interested in whistleblower movies lately, witness the quick demise of the Julian Assange biopic, The Fifth Estate.
Fifth place went to the horror/thriller Don’t Breathe, which slipped just 32.1% in spite of direct competition from Blair Witch. The $9.9 million production has now earned over $107 million worldwide, $75.3 million of that here in North America.
With the exception of the surrogate thriller When the Bough Breaks, which dipped 61%, the rest of the films in the top ten enjoyed good holds, but earned very modest amounts. The much-maligned Suicide Squad added $4.7 million to bring its domestic total to $313.8 million, the eighth best total of 2016 so far. Suicide Squad has a shot at matching Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice’s total of $330.4 million, though it is likely to fall just a bit short.
Be sure to check back here next week to see if Sony’s remake of the ensemble western The Magnificent Seven can get the “oater” genre off of life support, or if Warner Brothers’ animated Storks will steal away with the box office crown.