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The Weekend Round-up
Doctor Strange opened in the number one spot last weekend, and this weekend it had a great hold, falling just 37% to £3.4m (once previews are removed). For comparison, Thor: The Dark World, the last Marvel film to be released in October, fell 47% on its second weekend.
Trolls added £2m, which brings its total to £17.2m. It looks like it has the legs to crack the £20m mark.
The Accountant is the weekend’s highest new entry, kicking off its run with £1.6m (which includes £115k from previews). That’s the biggest opening of director, Gavin O’Connor’s career, eclipsing Warrior, which opened with £811k in 2011. It’s also a better opening than Argo managed, another Ben Affleck thriller which opened in November. Although that film had strong legs, thanks to a successful Oscar campaign.
A Street Cat Named Bob is another new entry in fourth. It opened with £986k, which is a solid performance from a film with no big names in it.
Nocturnal Animals opened in fifth with £755k, which includes £54k from previews. Tom Ford’s last film, A Single Man opened with £502k on its way to £3.2m in 2010, so Nocturnal Animals will be hoping to achieve a similar multiple on its opening weekend.
Outside of the top five, Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander drama, The Light Between Oceans, opened with £733k, which included £280k from previews after its Monday release.
Finally, in tenth Bridget Jones’s Baby added £330k and it is now the biggest film of 2016 to date, having so far banked £47.1m. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, out in two weeks, will have to go some to beat it.
Overall the box office was down 35% from last weekend and down 31% from the same weekend last year, when the top four films were SPECTRE, Hotel Transylvania 2, Brooklyn and Pan.
Next Weekend
Arrival is in cinemas on Thursday and is directed by Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Sicario). It stars Amy Adams as a brilliant linguist who is recruited by the military to assist in translating alien communications. It’s a stunning, mind-expanding sci-fi thriller, that is up there with the best the genre has had to offer in recent years. Don’t miss it.
American Pastoral is the directorial debut of Ewan McGregor. An adaptation of a Philip Roth novel, set in 1968, a hardworking man who's been a staple in his quaint community for years, watches his seemingly perfect middle-class life fall apart as his daughter's new radical political affiliation threatens to destroy their family. McGregor stars alongside Jennifer Connolly and Dakota Fanning.
The Buzz
Hacksaw Ridge is the latest film from Mel Gibson, and the first he’s directed since 2006’s Apocalypto. Andrew Garfield stars as WWII American Army Medic Desmond T. Doss, who served during the Battle of Okinawa. Doss refused to kill people and becomes the first conscientious objector in American history to be awarded the Medal of Honor. It opened in the US this past weekend, to a solid $14.8m, and has had some strong reviews, with many positioning it as a potential awards contender. Rex Reed in the New York Observer went all in, calling it ‘the best war film since Saving Private Ryan. It is violent, harrowing, heart-breaking and unforgettable’. Robbie Collin in The Telegraph said ‘Hacksaw Ridge is a fantastically moving and bruising war film that hits you like a raw topside of beef in the face’. It’s out in the UK on 27 January.
Across The Pond
A week after it topped the box office in the UK, Doctor Strange opened in the US and topped the box office there too. An opening weekend of $85m is the tenth largest opening for a Marvel movie. Trolls opened in second with $46.5m, and Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge opened with $15.2m. Last week’s number one, Tyler Perry's Boo! A Madea Halloween finished fourth, adding $7.7m for a new cume of $64.9m. Inferno rounded out the top five, adding $6.1m, and has now banked $26m.