Weekend Box Office: Angels fall upwards, apparently
You sickos wanted blood and you got it. Angel Has Fallen, the third film in one of the worst film franchises ever, exceeded expectations at the box office this weekend, reaping $21.25 million in gore-splattered bills that pretty much ensure the cold-blooded sadism of Gerard Butler’s Mike Banning will protect yet another president in the coming years. The thing is, we actually didn’t hate Angel Has Fallen, though it’s not too hard to top what we dubbed the worst film of 2016.
Bloodthirsty audiences also turned out for the sleeper horror hit Ready Or Not, which has ridden positive critical buzz—read our review!—to a $7.6 million weekend pull that, combined with its Wednesday and Thursday grosses, kicks it up to a $10.6 million total. Not bad for a movie that, up until its release, more or less hovered beneath the radar. The lesson? Never underestimate how much U.S. audiences love to watch the 1% scream in agonizing fear.
The good boys of Good Boys, meanwhile, succumbed to Angel’s storm of scowling bullets, dropping to second place with an $11.75 million haul that boosts its domestic total to $41.4 million. Box office titans Hobbs & Shaw and The Lion King maintained strong numbers in their fourth and sixth weeks, respectively, with the former pulling in a domestic total of $147 million and the latter a formidable $510 million. Globally, The Lion King inched past $1.5 billion worldwide, proving once again the power of recycled IP.
Other notable debuts include Overcomer and Brittany Runs A Marathon, the latter of which scored $175,969 from just five theaters. Jillian Bell stars in the feel-good comedy as an overweight woman training, sometimes haplessly, for, you guessed it, a marathon. Variety reports it will continue to expand to theaters before getting a nationwide release “after four or five weeks.”
Overcomer, meanwhile, is another faith-based film from the guys who brought you Kirk Cameron’s Fireproof. A sports drama, it’s the first release from Alex Kendrick since 2015's awful War Room, making Overcomer his first movie since Trump came into office and somehow proved American evangelicals to be even more morally bankrupt than we previously thought. Well, hallelujah, it was the third highest grossing movie over the weekend.