A big-budget remake of “Ben-Hur” was trampled under a herd of holdovers and new releases at the box office, the latest casualty in a bruising summer for Hollywood. The domestic total of 262 million dollars, left “Suicide Squad” in good shape to cross the 300-million-dollar mark.
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Paramount’s Ben-Hur came in a disappointing fifth place on its opening weekend.
The film has got very low keys reviews in America which could effect its gross in other countries when released and might sink quite fast. Ben-Hur conceivably could do the same thing, but this chariot race is not off to a great start. Taking a 55% drop in weekend two, the talking hot dog movie finished with $15.3 million to bring its two-week total to $65.3 million. Based on Lew Wallace’s timeless novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, the remake also stars Morgan Freeman and Rodrigo Santoro. War Dogs finished third this week with $14.3 million and I was expecting it to find a larger audience.
Kubo and the Two Strings was the only movie out of this trio of new releases that was a hit with critics, with a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Ben-Hur at 29% and War Dogs just barely missing a “Fresh” rating with 59%. He is also the English voice of Zak in “Zak McKracken: Between Time and Space”.
Fourth place belonged to the animated Kubo and the Two Strings which took in an estimated $12.6M from 3,260 theaters for a per screen average of $3,868.
As for the rest of the top 10, it was filled out by Pete’s Dragon, Bad Moms, Jason Bourne, The Secret Life of Pets and Florence Foster Jenkins.
Since Passion’s enormous $612 million box office success, following faith-based blockbusters such as Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014) and Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) failed to ignite the USA box office, relying on global box office returns to recoup huge production costs. Focus Features’ division Focus World, a theatrical-VOD label, is handling Love and Darkness.
Year-to-date box office is up 5.2%, according to comScore.
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Be proactive – Use the “Flag as Inappropriate” link at the upper right corner of each comment to let us know of abusive posts. Such a film is made more for worldwide audiences, he said, whose home markets don’t produce big-action spectacles.
