Weekend Box Office: Hobbs & Shaw cling to the top spot

Luke Hobbs and Deckard Shaw managed to fight off the real enemies of this weekend’s box office: children’s counterprogramming. For its second weekend, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw snagged the top spot (despite a 58% decline in revenue) while adding $25.4 million to its domestic gross and bringing their international total to $332.6 million. Securing a victory over new releases from four major studios is impressive, even if the collection of new arrivals vary in terms of critical and public acclaim. Another notable win goes to Guillermo del Toro’s Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, which led this weekend’s newcomers with a $20.8 million haul—a perfectly admirable feat of unexpected strength, considering that it premiered with over 1,200 less screens than Hobbs & Shaw this week and managed to only trail by less than $5 milllion. This marks Lion King’s first weekend in the third-place spot. The latest Disney remake is, however, fairly neck and neck with its terrifying counterpart, so who’s to say what will happen next week (besides box office analysts, obviously)?

While Scary Stories has a few reasons to celebrate, it was a slightly disappointing weekend for the rest of the premieres as Dora’s desire for adventure wasn’t as contagious as expected. Though the end of summer seemed ideal for live-action rendering of a popular kiddie legend, Paramount’s Dora And The Lost City Of Gold could only muster a fourth-place spot and $17 million for its trouble, despite decent reviews, a notable supporting cast, and marketing to spare. The rest of this weekend’s theater newbies were quickly victims of a crowded market: The Art Of Racing In The Rain, the latest entry in the canine cinema genre, premiered in sixth place after Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood while The Kitchen, equipped with three A-list leads and a “lukewarm execution,” according to our review, floundered with a $5.5 million domestic gross, leaving it in the No. 7 spot.

On the indie side of box office news for this weekend: The Shia LeBeouf and Zack Gottsagen-led Peanut Butter Falcon opened with 17 theaters and managed to garner this weekend’s highest per-theater average ($12,073) with a domestic total of $205,236. This coming weekend brings us the second installment of the Angry Birds Cinematic Universe, which currently maintains a surprising Rotten Tomatoes rating of 77% among critics, Good Boys, and Blinded By The Light. Can Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham outperform the surefire crowd-pleasers that are Bruce Springsteen music and decently crafted bird puns?

For more in-depth analysis of this weekend’s box office, check out Box Office Mojo.