It’s a very good year for Universal Pictures, who keeps crossing records with ease and ahead of schedule. The studio crossed the $2 billion box office mark for the year this weekend and still has a few things on tap for the remainder of 2015. Their latest film is Straight Outta Compton, a 2 1/2 hour film that pulled in $56 million this weekend in under 2,800 screens – which means $20k per screen this weekend. The film is getting great reviews and with the strong presence of the original members online that helped produce it the film definitely had set the audience to get in there from the start to support it.
The other new film this weekend is Man from UNCLE, which pretty much bombed at this point. While expectations are generally low for August, there’ve been some strong surprises the last few years with Guardians of the Galaxy and the TMNT reboot. With a slick marketing campaign that played up the era, the costumes, humor and action side, it landed with a thud at just $13 million for the weekend. The film itself has been in the works for a long time with an interesting list of actors and directors involved before it finally got made – the same year we have five or six spy movies out of course.
Beyond that, the weekend has been interesting to watch. M:I – Rogue Nation is performing well with a $17 million take to hold onto second place while building up a solid overseas box office as well where it added another $46 million. It’s total take is now $3737 million since it opened. On the downside, Fantastic Four has pretty much cratered after its already disastrous opening weekend. This weekend it did just $8 million on 4,000 screens, bringing its opening plus week total to $42 million domestically. It’s doing poorly overseas as well in fifty-five territories so far as it’s brought in $60 million total – just $16 million this weekend.
Next week has three films going wide with American Ultra from Lionsgate, Hitman: Agent 47 from Fox and Sinister 2 from Focus Features.
| RANK | TITLE | DISTRIBUTOR NAME | WEEKEND REVENUE | CUME REVENUE | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| REVENUE | # OF LOCATIONS* | LOC AVG | ||||
| 1 | Straight Outta Compton | Universal | $56,091,165 | 2,757 | 20,345 | $56,091,165 |
| 2 | Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation | Paramount | $17,000,000 | 3,700 | 4,594 | $138,136,555 |
| 3 | Man From U.N.C.L.E. | Warner Bros. | $13,535,000 | 3,638 | 3,720 | $13,535,000 |
| 4 | Fantastic Four | 20th Century Fox | $8,000,000 | 4,004 | 1,998 | $41,961,218 |
| 5 | Gift, The | STX Entertainment | $6,500,000 | 2,503 | 2,596 | $23,577,323 |
| 6 | Ant-Man | Disney | $5,517,000 | 2,306 | 2,392 | $157,567,253 |
| 7 | Vacation | Warner Bros. | $5,330,000 | 3,088 | 1,726 | $46,852,065 |
| 8 | Minions | Universal | $5,161,200 | 2,640 | 1,955 | $312,929,910 |
| 9 | Ricki And The Flash | Sony | $4,570,000 | 2,064 | 2,214 | $14,655,717 |
| 10 | Trainwreck | Universal | $3,836,160 | 1,998 | 1,920 | $97,955,120 |
| 11 | Pixels | Sony | $3,415,000 | 2,176 | 1,569 | $64,532,781 |
| 12 | Shaun The Sheep Movie | Lionsgate | $2,850,000 | 2,360 | 1,207 | $11,117,271 |
Not much of a surprise. Much is made about this topping the opening weekend of “8 Mile”, which is nonsense, when you’re comparing box office receipts to 2 movies which are 13 years apart. To me, the interesting number is going to be what the dropoff is going to be over the next 2 weeks.