According to The Wall Street Journal, the remake of the classic film flopped at this weekend’s box office.
Advertisement
One movie that won’t be receiving any love from the Academy is the remake of Ben-Hur. It earned a lackluster “B” CinemaScore from opening day audiences.
Suicide Squad held the number one spot, taking $20.7m (£15.8m) on its third weekend of release, despite a lukewarm response from critics.
Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s R-rated animated comedy Sausage Party lands in second place with $15.3 million (GBP11.7 million), and Miles Teller and Jonah Hill’s new film War Dogs, in which they portray unlikely global arms dealers, opens in third with $14.3 million (GBP10.9 million). It shocked the industry in 2015 when it opened with .3 million (going on to have a lifetime gross of $67.7 million). In fifth, Ben-Hur could not live up to its illustrious name, as critical panning also led to a lackluster opening, with an estimated $11.4 million for the weekend against a $100 million budget.
With “Ben-Hur” faltering, “Suicide Squad” managed to snag first place for the third consecutive weekend. It made another $10.7 million internationally, but it’s still apparently considered a poor result.
“Kubo and the Two Strings”, the latest from stop-motion animation studio Laika Entertainment, landed in fourth with $12.6 million, barely meeting analyst expectations of $12 million to $15 million. “Audiences are saying, ‘remakes or sequels have got to be great or original if you want us to show up'”.
The superhero epic “Suicide Squad” from Warner Bros. added another estimated $20.7 million in its third week, landing in first place.
Though the director of the new “Ben-Hur”, Timur Bekmambetov (“Wanted“, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter“), put a thrilling chariot race in his movie, along with a few other above-average action sequences, it’s nowhere close to delivering on the dramatics or story strength of the Heston version (even with Bekmambetov’s having a scene in which Jesus is crucified).
Advertisement
Todd Phillips’ 1st film since the Hangover trilogy, War Dogs, opened in 3rd place with $14.3-M from 3,258 theaters. Despite the ups and downs of individual films, the box office overall is enjoying a potentially record August usually a sleepy month of summer stragglers.
