A hardcore fanbase of thrill-seeking raccoon fetishists flooded the theaters for Guardians Of The Galaxy, sending the film to a first place with a record-setting August opening of $94 million—and offering further testimony to the continued staying power of the raccoon fetish market. That Guardians bears the official Marvel brand name probably didn’t hurt either: Despite boasting some much lesser-known characters from its comics universe, Guardians nearly matched the $95 million debut for Captain America: Winter Soldier, and it bested non-in-house Marvel character movies The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and X-Men: Days Of Future Past—confirming that audiences trust that the Marvel studio, more than anyone else, to deliver their Marvel movies.
It also doesn’t hurt that Guardians promised a sense of adventurous fun, amid summer’s now-usual barrage of grim apocalypses. Add in America’s yearning, burning desire to have a raccoon talk dirty to them—and a certain subsect of perverts with a thing for trees—and you have a mammoth hit. (Sorry, mammoth fetishists; it’s just a figure of speech.)
With such fierce competition and no other raccoons in sight, nothing else came close to matching Guardians’ dominance. Lucy tumbled to second place, but having made double its $40 million budget already, it still made out better than the far more expensive Hercules, which plummeted 64 percent to fourth place and has barely cleared $52 million total domestically. Hercules was defeated by another bit of ham-handed myth-making, the James Brown biopic Get On Up from The Help’s Tate Taylor, which landed in third place with $14 million from music biopic fetishists—all getting offa that thing where a singer undergoes a predictable dramatic arc, while briefly interacting with other famous historical people.
Finally, Calvary made the best of its limited release, with the Brendan Gleeson-starring, blackly comic film taking in $72,800 in four theatres, for a per-screen average of $18,200. That’s not bad for a bleak Irish drama about a Catholic priest opening in the middle of summer blockbuster season, but certainly not enough to match the $23,039, raccoon-loving per-screen average of Guardians. It just goes to prove what we’ve long said—that the Catholic church could use a little deviancy.
For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.