| Date | |
|---|---|
| Author | Tom Linay |
The Weekend Round-up
- The Lion King always looked like one of the biggest films of 2019 and so it proved as it opened this weekend with a huge £16.7m, the second biggest opening weekend of the year so far only behind Avengers: Endgame’s £31.5m debut. In terms of recent Disney live-action titles, Beauty And The Beast opened with a huge £19.7m, while The Jungle Book opened with £9.9m, and Aladdin with a three-day total of £5.7m. The Jungle Book finished on £46.2m, which The Lion King now looks nailed on to beat, while Beauty And The Beast is the current queen of the recent live-action remakes, finishing on £72.4m. With the entirety of the summer school holidays in front of The Lion King, it has a good chance of beating it.
- Toy Story 4 stayed in second, posting a terrific hold in the face of competition from The Lion King, falling just 29% to £2.7m, which takes its total to £47.3m. It has now overtaken the final totals of Toy Story 2 (£44.3m) and Finding Dory (£43m). It still has some way to go to top last year’s Incredibles 2 (£56.2m) but with the school holidays just starting, it looks like it will get there.
- Last weekend’s top film, Spider-Man: Far From Home, fell to third adding £2.3m, which takes its total to £27.2m. It’s now the fifth biggest film of 2019 and by this time next week it should have surpassed Spider-Man: Homecoming’s final total of £30.7m. Spider-Man 3 is still the biggest Spider-Man film at the UK box office with £33.6m and Far From Home has a good chance of knocking it off its perch.
- Yesterday has been holding up consistently well since it opened at the end of June, and once again it posted a strong hold, falling 29% to £775k. That takes its total to £9.9m and over the next couple of days it should cross the £10m mark. It’s now Danny Boyle’s fifth-highest release to date, behind Trainspotting (£12.4m), The Beach (£13.3m), T2 Trainspotting (£17.0m) and Slumdog Millionaire (£31.6m).
- Annabelle Comes Home completed the top five, adding £771k for a new total of £4m. While it’s a solid performance, it looks like Annabelle Comes Home will be the lowest grossing film in the series, behind 2014’s Annabelle (£7.5m) and 2017’s Annabelle: Creation (£8.3m).
- Outside the top five, distressing horror, Midsommar crossed the £2m mark in eighth, while Apollo 11 saw a boost from the 50th anniversary of the moon landings, adding £115k for a new total of £1.1m. It’s now the highest grossing documentary of 2019 to date, having just overtaken Diego Maradona.
Overall the box office is up 81% from last weekend and up 23% from the same weekend last year when the top films were Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, Incredibles 2, Skyscraper and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.
Next Weekend
- Horrible Histories: The Movie – Rotten Romans is a big screen outing for the BBC sketch comedy series. The cast includes Nick Frost, Kim Cattrall and Derek Jacobi.
- The Current War is the story of the cutthroat race between electricity titans Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse to determine whose electrical system would power the modern world. Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Shannon and Tom Holland star.
The Buzz
Crawl is a thriller starring Kaya Scodelario as a young woman who, while attempting to save her father during a category five hurricane, finds herself trapped in a flooding house and must fight for her life against alligators. It opened in the US a couple of weeks ago and has had some strong reviews, with critics praising it as a simple thriller that delivers. Slate called it ‘fast, efficient, crisply directed, and delivers on the promised alligator thrills’, while IGN said it gets plenty of mileage out of its setting and people’s deep-set fear of being eaten’. It’s in cinemas on 23 August.
Across The Pond
The Lion King topped the box office in the US with a huge $185m, the second biggest opening of the year so far and seventh biggest of all-time. Spider-Man: Far From Home fell to second, adding $21m for a new total of $319.7m. Toy Story 4 posted a strong hold, falling 30% to $14.6m for a new total of $375.5m. Crawl added $6m in fourth, taking its total to £23.8m. Yesterday completed the top five, falling just 24% to $5.1m, taking its total to an impressive $57.6m.