Weekend Box Office: That dumb Angel Has Fallen into the top spot again
Once more, the Labor Day holiday weekend gave Americans the chance for a three-day vacation, and again they responded by largely choosing to ignore the movie theaters, instead doing strange and unusual activities like being outside and talking to other humans. But hey, that was good news for Angel Has Fallen, which rode audiences’ general apathy toward any cinematic goings-on this past weekend all the way to the bank. The nearly two-hour exercise in watching Gerard Butler glower and desultorily punch guys stayed atop the box office charts for a second weekend, pulling in roughly $11.57 million more by Sunday night on its way to an estimated $43.6 million total returns.
Good Boys proved that its boys are, indeed, pretty good, as the R-rated comedy managed to reclaim the second-place spot after dipping to third last week. The film dropped only 20% further and pulled in an estimated $9.19 million, bringing its haul past $56 million and giving hope to dorky tween guys everywhere that they, too, can be marquee stars. (Dudes, you probably can’t, but don’t worry—middle school only lasts so long.) Third place was claimed by the soulless CGI remake of The Lion King, which not only brought in another estimated $6.7 million domestically, but hit $1.56 billion internationally, meaning it has bypassed The Avengers as the seventh highest grossing film of all time, an increasingly useless metric that seems to be upset like clockwork with each passing year and/or major Marvel release.
Fourth place honors to go Hobbs & Shaw (sorry, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw), whose stars kept cartoonishly punching Idris Elba while the latter rode a motorcycle that is basically a Transformer, like how did no one call that out during filming, it’s ridiculous. Anyway, it earned an estimated $6.28 million, good on it. Fifth place was a bit of an upset, as Ready Or Not, the entertaining spin on The Most Dangerous Game, ended up managing to fend off Overcomer, the latest pandering faith-based crap shat out by Affirm Studios. This is both a reminder that Americans would rather see the richest 1% get their comeuppance than sit through garbage just because Christian hucksters pretend Jesus wants them to, and also a note to Universal Studios that it probably could have made a mint: Instead of canceling the release of the hunting-people-for-sport movie The Hunt just because the president tweeted about it, the studio could have slapped a label on it—“The movie Donald Trump doesn’t want you to see!”—and added 500 theaters to its total count.
The news was pretty milquetoast for new releases: The bland sci-fi thriller Don’t Let Go landed all the way down in 14th place with only $2.4 million, demonstrating the phone calls from the past truly aren’t very valuable, and the so-so Iraq War whistleblower story Official Secrets made off with roughly $80,000 in four theaters. Due to the holiday, exact tallies won’t be published until later tonight, but you can find the complete breakdown over at Box Office Mojo.