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The Weekend Round-up
The Girl on the Train brought Bridget Jones’s Baby’s three-week run at the top to an emergency stop as it opened with an impressive £7m. That figure includes £1.8m from previews on Wednesday and Thursday, but the Friday to Sunday total of £5.2m is a big improvement over Gone Girl’s £3.6m Friday to Sunday total almost exactly two years ago. That film had terrific holds over the following weeks to end on £22.6m, so The Girl on the Train will be hoping for a similar burn rate.
Bridget Jones’s Baby fell to second but still added an impressive £3m, for a new cume of £37.9m. It’s now the fourth biggest film of the year and looks set to break the £40m mark in the next week. It should pass Finding Dory (£42m) to become the second biggest film of the year to date by the end of its run.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children had a strong hold in third, falling 34% to £2.2m. After 10 days in cinemas, Tim Burton’s gothic drama has banked £6.7m.
Deepwater Horizon added £988k in fourth, bringing its total to £3.8m. It has easily surpassed director, Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg’s last collaboration, Lone Survivor’s final total of £2.1m.
The Magnificent Seven completed the top five, adding £511k and crossing the £5m mark in the process. It has now banked £5.4m.
Outside of the top five, War on Everyone opened in seventh with £188k, which included £40k in previews and Louis Theroux’s My Scientology Movie had a terrific result, opening with £107k in 11th from just 26 locations.
Overall the box office was up 9% from last weekend and up 56% from the same weekend last year, when the top four films were The Martian, Sicario, The Walk and Legend.
Next Weekend
Inferno opens on Friday and is the third film in Dan Brown’s series featuring the character Robert Langdon, played by Tom Hanks. When Langdon wakes up in an Italian hospital with amnesia, he teams up with Dr. Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), and together they must race across Europe against the clock to foil a deadly global plot. The Da Vinci Code grossed £30.5m in 2006 and the follow-up, Angels & Demons, grossed £18.8m in 2009.
Storks is a comedy animation about the titular birds, who have moved on from delivering babies to packages. But when an order for a baby appears, the best delivery stork must scramble to fix the error by delivering the baby. It delivered 96k in previews at the weekend.
American Honey is the latest from British director, Andrea Arnold. A teenage girl with nothing to lose joins a traveling magazine sales crew, and gets caught up in a whirlwind of hard partying, law bending and young love as she criss-crosses the Midwest with a band of misfits. It won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
The Buzz
A few months ago The Birth of a Nation looked like one of the major frontrunners for next year’s awards and after Fox Searchlight bought distribution rights for $17.5m at Sundance, it looked nailed on for commercial success too. It opened in the US on Friday and while reviews have been mostly positive – it has a score of 68 on Metacritic, it could only manage $7.1m in its first three days, which was enough for sixth place in the top 10. It opens in the UK on 20 January and plays the BFI London Film Festival this week.
Across The Pond
The Girl on the Train opened in the top spot in the US, kicking off its run with $24.7m. Last weekend's number one, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, fell to second but added $15m for a new cume of $51.1m. Deepwater Horizon fell 42% to $11.8m in third and has now banked $38.5m. The Magnificent Seven, in fourth, added $9.2m for a new cume of $75.9m and Storks completed the top five, adding $8.5m for a new cume of $50.1m.