| Date | |
|---|---|
| Author | Zoe Aresti |
The Weekend Round-up
The UK’s love for Roald Dahl is all present and correct as The BFG opened with £5.3m, the seventh biggest opening weekend of the year. Had it not been for sensational weather on Saturday, it would have been a good deal bigger. With the school holidays now underway, it should have a long and fruitful run throughout July and August. We’ve used another classic British literary character, Paddington, as a comparative and that film opened with £5.2m in 2014, on its way to a final gross of £37.9m.
The third in the rebooted Star Trek series, Star Trek Beyond, opened with £4.7m, which is the ninth biggest opening weekend of the year to date. That’s slightly below the £5.1m 2009’s Star Trek opened with and a bit of a way behind the £6.9m Star Trek Into Darkness opened with in 2013. Like The BFG though, Star Trek Beyond was hampered by the weather so there’s hope it can pick up in midweek.
Event cinema shoots back into the top five, as Andre Rieu’s 2016 Maastricht Concert delivered £1.4m over the weekend to become the highest-grossing music concert of all time. It’s a strong improvement over the £1m last year’s event grossed, which itself was a record.
Last week’s number one, Ghostbusters, is in fourth and like all holdover films, it had a steep drop, falling 51% to £1.3m. It has now grossed £7.2m and will be hoping to attract the family audience during the holidays.
The Secret Life of Pets rounded out the top five, adding £1.2m for a new total of £28m. Outside of the top five, The Legend of Tarzan crossed the £8m mark after adding £634k in seventh.
Overall the box office was up 7% from last weekend and almost exactly on par from the same weekend last year, when the top four films were Ant-Man, Minions, Ted 2 and Jurassic World.
Next weekend
Jason Bourne sees Matt Damon return as the iconic character with a dodgy memory. Directed by Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum), it’s very much more of the same but when the previous two Matt Damon Bourne films were two of the best action films of the century, that’s a good thing. The Bourne Ultimatum grossed £24m in 2007.
Finding Dory is the long-awaited sequel to Finding Nemo and is set to be one of the biggest films of the year. It was released in the US in mid-June and is already the highest-grossing animated film of all time there ($460m and counting). Expect it to draw in massive crowds across the summer holidays.
The Buzz
Lights Out is a low-budget horror produced by master of the genre, James Wan (The Conjuring 2: The Enfield Case). When her little brother, Martin, experiences the same events that once tested her sanity, Rebecca works to unlock the truth behind the terror, which brings her face to face with an entity that has an attachment to their mother, Sophie. It opened in the US on Friday and grossed $21.6m. That’s even more impressive when you consider it reportedly cost less than $5m to make. It’s out in the UK on 19 August.
Across The Pond
Star Trek Beyond opened in the top spot with $59.3m, and mirroring its UK performance, that was a decent way down on the $70.1m opening for Star Trek Into Darkness in 2013. Last week’s number one, The Secret Life of Pets came in second, falling 42% to $29.6m and has now grossed just short of $261m.
Lights Out had an impressive debut in third, kicking off its run with $21.7m. The weekend’s big disappointment in fourth was Ice Age: Collision Course, which could only muster $21.4m on its opening weekend, way down on the $46.6m Ice Age: Continental Drift debuted with in 2012.
Ghostbusters dropped to fifth, adding $21m for a new cume of $86.2m.
