Jerry Lewis is dead, the moon is blotting out the sun, fascism is somehow still a thing, and a just-above-direct-to-video-grade Midnight Run retread with the tagline “Get triggered” is No. 1 at the box office. It would take a Panglossian level of optimistic naïveté to not point out that something just seems wrong here.
Anyway, The Hitman’s Bodyguard—which is sort of fun in spots—dominated this one of the weakest weekends of the year, making an estimated $21.6 million to land in the top spot. Meanwhile, Steven Soderbergh’s eccentric heist film Logan Lucky—which is pretty fun overall, give or take an English-accented Seth MacFarlane—ended up coming in at No. 3 with just a little over $8 million, which befits its underdog point of view, but sadly robs the world of a spin-off focused on Daniel Craig’s fussbucket career criminal Joe Bang. Meanwhile, last week’s No. 1, the horror prequel Annabelle: Creation, took the No. 2 spot with $15.5 million.
Otherwise, no movies did really well this weekend; even the limited release per-theater averages turned out middling to miserable. The wannabe indie crowd-pleaser Patti Cake$, which was bought by Fox Searchlight for a hefty $9.5 million, averaged an underwhelming $4,714 per screen, once again proving that the primary audience for these Sundance items is probably at Sundance and that the distributor that paid $12 million for Me And Earl And The Dying Girl and $17.5 million for The Birth Of A Nation should maybe consider setting a spending cap for future Sundance-hype-echo-chamber bidding frenzies. Unfortunately, the thoughtful Marjorie Prime didn’t exactly rake it in either, averaging an estimated $4,000 per screen at 6 locations.
As for the rest of the top 10, it was filled out by titles that ranged from the familiar to the already forgotten, including Dunkirk (No. 4, $6.7 million), The Nut Job 2: Nutty By Nature (No. 5, $5.1 million), The Emoji Movie (No. 6, $4.4 million), Spider-Man: Homecoming (No. 7, $4.3 million), and Girls Trip (No. 8, $3.8 million). The Dark Tower tumbled ignominiously in its third week to No. 9 with $3.7 million, while Wind River jumped 10 places to No. 10 in wide expansion, grossing a little over $3 million. That’s the closest this weekend has to a success story.