“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. Paramount was expecting domestic weekend sales of about $20 million, while estimates from forecasters such as Hollywood Stock Exchange and BoxOfficePro.com ranged as high as $13 million. When you add in the worldwide gross, the film has made nearly $573 million, which is pretty good for a film that has taken the hits from critics like Suicide Squad has.
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In fourth place was the new animated film Kubo and the Two Strings with $12.6 million.
Here is the global top 5.
Hollywood’s latest big-budget attempt to fill multiplexes with faith-based moviegoers and general audiences floundered this weekend, collecting an estimated $11.4 million in fifth place in the USA and Canada. MGM partnered with Paramount in making Ben-Hur and put up the majority of the financing, or 80 percent.
Based on a true story, War Dogs took in a nice $14.3M in its opening weekend to land in third place.
Two other new releases also had better openings than Ben-Hur. The war dramedy, earning a B CinemaScore, stars Miles Teller and Jonah Hill and is loosely based on the true story of two young Florida men who became worldwide arms dealers during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
The new film stars Jack Huston as Judah Ben-Hur, alongside Morgan Freeman and Rodrigo Santoro, who plays Jesus Christ. The weekend’s family friendly offering, LAIKA’s latest stop-motion animated film Kubo and the Two Strings, opened to the lowest first weekend to date of any release from that production company. The film grossed $ 65 million in revenue for a budget of 19 million. After almost 3 weeks in theaters, the DC comic book adaptation has earned over $260 million domestically.
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However, in today’s moviegoing landscape, if audiences want to see a movie in theaters that’s two hours long, it better feature all our favorite superheroes jammed in it or Leonardo DiCaprio frozen in the wilderness fighting a bear and sleeping inside a horse. It could also very well kill the historical epic genre for good.
