| Date | |
|---|---|
| Author | Tom Linay |
The Weekend Round-up
- Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood opened in the top spot with a terrific £7.5m, which includes £2.4m from previews. The Friday to Sunday opening of £5.1m is comfortably the biggest opening for a Tarantino film, easily topping the £2.8m that Django Unchained opened with in January 2013. That film is still Tarantino’s biggest hit in the UK, finishing its run on £15.7m but Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood looks certain to beat it by a healthy amount.
- The Lion King fell to second but posted a solid hold, falling 43% to £2.5m. In the last week it has crossed the £60m mark and is now on £66m. It’s comfortably the second biggest film of 2019 to date, behind Avengers: Endgame (£88.6m) and is likely to stay that way at least until Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker is released in December.
- Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw fell to third, adding £1.4m for a new total of £16.3m. It’s currently the fifth biggest film in the Fast & Furious series and has to reach £18.6m to overtake Fast & Furious 5, which is currently the fourth biggest film in the series.
- Dora And The Lost City Of Gold opened in fourth with £1.2m, which includes £56k from previews. Family films that aren’t Toy Story 4 or The Lion King have suffered a bit this summer (see Uglydolls below) but this is a solid opening for the the live-action adventure.
- Toy Story 4 rounded out the top five, falling just 37% to £1m. Like The Lion King, in the last week it has crossed the £60m mark and now sits on £61.2m. While Toy Story 3’s final total of £74.1m is out of reach, Toy Story 4 is firmly established as the second biggest animated film of all-time, ahead of Incredibles 2 (£56.2m) in third.
- Outside of the top five, Good Boys opened in sixth with £844k. US comedy hasn’t had a great year so far and this opening falls between Booksmart’s £634k and The Hustle’s £1m opening weekends. Animation, Uglydolls opened in 11th with £266k.
Overall the box office is up 26% from last weekend and up 3% from the same weekend last year when the top films were Disney’s Christopher Robin, Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again!, The Meg and The Equalizer 2.
Next Weekend
- Angel Has Fallen is the third film in the series where something falls. This time it’s not the area in Islington, it’s Gerard Butler’s character Secret Service Agent Mike Banning, who is framed for the attempted assassination of the President and must evade his own agency and the FBI as he tries to uncover the real threat. If you’ve seen either of the previous two … Has Fallen films, you’ll know what to expect.
- Crawl is a home invasion film where the invaders are alligators. Kaya Scodelario plays a young woman who while attempting to save her father during a category 5 hurricane, finds herself trapped in a flooding house and must fight for her life against alligators. Apparently it will do for flooded houses what Jaws did for the sea, or something.
- Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark is a spooky horror produced by Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape Of Water. A group of teens face their fears in order to save their lives.
- Pain And Glory is the latest film from Pedro Almodóvar. Antonio Banderas plays a film director who reflects on the choices he's made in life as past and present come crashing down around him. Banderas won the Best Actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, while Penelope Cruz co-stars.
The Buzz
Ready Or Not is a horror film about a bride on her wedding night, which takes a sinister turn when her eccentric new in-laws force her to take part in a terrifying game. Reviews in the US have been terrific. IndieWire said it’s ‘wickedly entertaining from start to finish, and painted with enough fresh personality to resolve into something more than the sum of its parts’ and Variety were even more glowing, saying it ‘packs subversive pleasures aplenty, exaggerating the anxieties of marrying into an unfamiliar family by confronting its unsuspecting bride with a worst-case set of in-laws’. They added that the distributor ‘has a real winner on its hands — that rare Get Out-like horror movie capable of delivering superficial diversion alongside deep cultural critique’. It’s in cinemas on 27 September.
Across The Pond
Universal's Good Boys opened in the top spot with $21m, making it Universal’s third straight weekend at number one. Hobbs & Shaw dropped one place to second, falling 44% to $14.1m, which takes its total to $133.7m. The Lion King came in third, adding $11.9m and it’s now on $496.1m. It will cross $500m this week. The Angry Birds Movie 2 opened on Tuesday, and is now up to $16.2m. The original had a three day opening weekend of $38m so this sequel has seen serious drop-off. Completing the top five is Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which fell 52% to $10.1m and a new total of $40.2m.