In a horrible disruption of the space-time continuum, Paramount accidentally created an alternate timeline where Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in a Terminator movie and people only sort of care. Harkening back to 1984 and 1991, when caring about Terminator movies was all the rage, the spellcheck-deprived cybernetic lifeforms behind Terminator Genisys made some seemingly minute changes to the status quo—replacing James Cameron with the dude who directed that second Thor movie, replacing Michael Biehn with an Australian robot—resulting in a dystopian present wherein Schwarzenegger fighting Schwarzenegger is not a big box-office draw. Oh, the horrors of tampering with (cinematic) history!
To be fair, Genisys didn’t flat-out flop: Over the five-day holiday weekend, the film grossed about $44 million, which is a tiny bit more than the last two Terminator sequels took in during their debut days. And internationally, it’s doing solid business, having claimed some $85 million in various global markets. But at a budget of $155 million before advertising, this fifth Terminator has a ways to go before folks will consider it a profitable decision—and a weak $7,000 or so average on American screens doesn’t seem to indicate major audience enthusiasm. Whether this quasi-reboot will spawn the new trilogy its makers have promised will probably depend on how Genisys does overseas these next few weeks. Judgment Day, in other words, looms for the Terminator franchise.
While Ahnold locked down the number three position on the U.S. charts, the battle between rampaging dinosaurs and rampaging feelings raged on. Jurassic World landed in first place for a fourth weekend in a row, making another $30.9 million and rising to a cumulative domestic gross of $558 million; it is now the fourth highest-grossing film of all time in America and the fifth highest-grossing of all time worldwide. Inside Out was a very close second with $30.1 million—in fact, most estimates are putting the Pixar film slightly ahead of Jurassic World for the full holiday stretch. We don’t want to jump to conclusions here, but the continued dominance of these two films clearly indicates that November’s The Good Dinosaur—a Pixar movie about dinosaurs—will be the biggest hit of all time.
The other major studio release of the Independence Day weekend was Magic Mike XXL, whose five-day tally of $26.6 million might seem, um, small compared to the competition, but keep in mind that it only cost about $14 million and features no super powers, unless you count Channing Tatum’s abs as a super power, which you probably should. The sequel did make a bit less than what the first Magic Mike lassoed in its opening weekend, presumably because Matthew McConaughey’s abs declined to reprise their role. Box Office Mojo is indicating that a whopping 96-percent of the audience for XXL was female; that would seem to put to rest any studio reservations about making films specifically targeted to women, but you can probably count on Hollywood finding a way to miss the point. On an unrelated note, Ted 2—a film fit exclusively for juvenile men of all ages—fell 67 percent in its second weekend, proving itself neither a grower nor a shower.
For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.