Box Office - Lucy holds top spot again

Lucy held the top spot for the second successive weekend, falling 37% to £2m and a very healthy cume of £8m. It’s already director, Luc Besson’s (Leon, The Fifth Element) biggest UK hit and signals a return to box office form after last year’s disappointing, The Family (£1.1m). There’s still plenty more to come too and it should finish its run north of £12m.

Let’s Be Cops was the highest new entry in second with £1.7m, £506k of which came from Wednesday and Thursday previews. On paper it didn’t look that promising, with a relatively unknown cast and a director with a patchy track record (Something Borrowed, The Girl Next Door) but it’s strong US performance hinted that the marketing was connecting with audiences and the UK opening confirms that. There also appears to be a strong disconnect between critics’ reviews and audience reaction. It has a rating of 30 (out of 100) on Metacritic, which aggregates prominent critics’ ratings, while on IMDB it has a much more healthy audience rating of 6.8 (out of ten).

The Inbetweeners 2 fell one spot to third but a further £1.3m takes the comic blockbuster over the £30m mark and it now sits on a huge £31m. It will ultimately fall some way short of the first film’s £45m final total but it’s still a fantastic performance. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For came in fourth with £1.1m (including £616k from previews), which is a hugely disappointing result, especially considering it opened last Monday. The first Sin City opened with £2.5m in 2005 and went on to finish on £7.1m and it’s a film that is still held in very high regard (it’s #173 on the IMDB Top 250) but it would appear that the fans are not keen to see a sequel.

Guardians of the Galaxy dropped to fifth but fell a paltry 19% to £1m for a terrific cume of £24.5m. Another new entry, If I Stay opened in sixth with £505k. It sadly couldn’t replicate its solid US opening ($16.4m). A couple of other new entries disappointed in Paris-set horror, As Above, So Below in eighth with £399k and Million Dollar Arm in fifteenth with £150k. Overall the box office was down 18% from last weekend and down 11% from the same weekend last year when One Direction: This Is Us and Pain and Gain went on general release. Both films were heavily boosted by previews so the Friday to Sunday totals will be a lot closer.

Next Weekend

We’re out of the school holidays so the film line-up starts to take a more cerebral appearance. Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth reunite after January’s The Railway Man in another literary adaptation, Before I Go To Sleep. Helen Mirren and Om Puri star in The Hundred-Foot Journey, which has so far taken $39.4m to date in the US and Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens makes a claim to leading man status in stylish thriller, The Guest. Sex Tape is also in cinemas.

The Buzz

The Riot Club hits cinemas on 19 September and Total Film awarded it four stars, saying writer Laura Wade ‘adapting her own savagely funny play, Posh … betters it by adding an additional female presence’. Out on the same day is Liam Neeson thriller, A Walk Among The Tombstones, which Empire gave four stars, calling ‘weighty, solid and sharp’.

Across The Pond

Guardians of the Galaxy held on to the top spot, falling a meagre 5% to $16.5m for a cume of $274.6m. It’s now comfortably the highest grossing film of the year so far and should finish over $300m. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles held on to second spot, falling 30% to $11.8m and it has now grossed a strong $162.4m. If I Stay was in third with $9.3m and after ten days has grossed $29.8m. As Above, So Below was the highest new entry, kicking off with $8.3m, which is about par for a film of this kind on Labor Day weekend. Let's Be Cops completed the top five with $8.2m, for a very respectable cume of $57.3m.