Perpetuating a cycle that continues to give nerds huge persecution complexes even though basically the entire entertainment industry is now organized around their interests, big bad bully Jason Bourne muscled geeky sci-fi sequel Star Trek Beyond out of the No. 1 spot at the American box office this weekend. That marks not only the second-biggest opening yet for a Bourne movie, but also a precipitous drop for Beyond, which fell 59 percent below last weekend’s opening. Meanwhile, while those two were duking it out Bad Moms came in at No. 3, in defiance of the collective existential despair produced in the film’s target demographic upon learning that Mila Kunis is considered a “mom type” now.
That’s about it for the week’s big new releases, aside from Nerve, which came in below expectations at No. 8, perhaps due to the film’s marketing failing to fully hammer home the Pokémon Go parallels in the plot. (Not that it would have mattered, unless theaters showing the film were all designated PokéStops.) Or maybe the YA trend really has run its course (no pun intended)—they did move the last Divergent movie to TV, after all. Regardless, the rest of the Top 10 was filled with profitable holdovers like The Secret Life Of Pets (now in its fourth week), Finding Dory (in its seventh) and Lights Out, which so far has made $42 million on its $4.9 million production budget.
A little further down the charts, the culture wars rage on as Hillary’s America: The Secret History Of The Democratic Party ($2.38 million) just barely beat Cafe Society ($2.25 million) in box-office receipts, which sounds alarming until you realize that Cafe Society is playing in 565 theaters, and Hillary’s America 1,066, meaning that Woody Allen is spanking Dinesh D’Souza in per-theater averages. But that might just be our liberal bias talking. Speaking of—despite never having reached No. 1, between domestic and box-office receipts, Ghostbusters (currently at No. 7) has now officially earned back its production budget at $158 million, a statement that surely someone, somewhere, is currently spinning into a statement on women busting ghosts, or wearing jumpsuits, or winking, or just leaving the house in general.