The movie skewed slightly female (51%).
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What did you go see this weekend?
Although MGM put up roughly 80% of the budget for the film, its failure will be felt at Paramount.
So an 11th-hour push to the faith-based demo didn’t save “Ben-Hur”, but the bigger issue is the disinterest in the sword-and-sandal story to begin with.
“This is the epic fail of the summer”, Jeff Bock (Exhibitor Relations senior box-office analyst) said to USA Today. Considering the loss they’re already likely to suffer on other underperformers such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Zoolander 2, and even Star Trek Beyond, which is a modest hit, but performing far below the other entries in the franchise.
The financial picture did not look rosier on the worldwide front: Ben-Hur opened in 23 markets, grossing $10.7 million.
The film, it seems, could not expand beyond its core Christian audience.
The third- thru fifth-place finishers, all new to the list, ride the gamut from critical praise to critical trashing, but they all have a common issue – rough opening weekends.
“Suicide Squad” earned an additional 20.7 million US dollars, dropping 52.4 percent compared to last weekend, according to estimated figures released Sunday by Box Office Mojo. Warner Bros. was originally approached to partner on the film, but passed, according to an individual with knowledge of the matter.
The weekend also marked the launch of “War Dogs”, an off-beat comedy about weapons dealers, picked up a modest $14.3 million for a fourth-place finish. With a CinemaScore of a B and middling reviews, don’t look for this one to last very long.
“Suicide Squad’s” third consecutive week on top of the box office, and failure of a big budget remake of “Ben-Hur” to attract movie-goers is the highlight of the last weekend United States box-office.
Ben-Hur also proves the long-held belief that rebooting classics is nearly never a good idea; as Deadline’s report points out, both 1998’s Psycho ($21.5M), and 2006’s All The King’s Men ($7.2M) failed to make a profit at the box-office (the Coen Brother’s True Grit being the exception).
Sausage Party, from Sony (NYSE:SNE) and Annapurna Pictures, took 2nd place with $15.3-M from 3,103 locations for a 10-day domestic box office total of $65.9-M. the R-rated animated comedy fell 55%.
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Jack Huston stars as Judah Ben-Hur in the new release, which also features Toby Kebbell as his adopted brother and nemesis Messala and Rodrigo Santoro as Jesus. This year’s souped-up remake film, directed by Timur Bekmambetov, only scraped up $11.4 million at the box office this weekend, easily making it one of the biggest flops of the summer.
