Debuting with a piddling $14.7 million and a third place finish, the Guy Ritchie-directed King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword has turned out be a huge flop. Some industry news sources are predicting that it could lose as much as $150 million, having also flopped in China. (In fact, The Hollywood Reporter estimates it had the third worst opening weekend ever for a movie with such a large budget and wide release, behind Monster Trucks and the all-time champ, Mars Needs Moms.) That’s a shame, because although it’s clearly the lesser of this year’s two Charlie-Hunnam-as-updated-Arthurian-figure vision quest movies, it had some fun parts.
King Arthur was badly beaten by another under-performer, Snatched, the Amy Schumer-led comedy that marked Goldie Hawn’s first role in 15 years. Grossing an estimated $17.5 million, the film fell somewhat below expectations, and well short of the kind of opening it would need to recoup its modest-by-Hollywood-standards $42 million budget. Meanwhile, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 held on to top spot with $63 million—an amount that would be huge for an opening weekend, but is crazy for a second weekend following the usual 50-60 percent attendance drop.
The Fate Of The Furious slipped down to fourth with $5.3 million, while The Boss Baby went to fifth with $4.6 million. Besides King Arthur and Snatched, the only new release to find its way into the Top 10 was the modest Lowriders, which took the No. 8 spot with $2.4 million. Meanwhile, Doug Liman’s war movie The Wall made just $891,590 in over 500 theaters. As readers of Weekend Box Office know, the most metric of success for limited, indie, and speciality releases is the per theater average. And the winner of the weekend in that category was… Paris Can Wait? That managed an impressive $25,456 per theater average across four theaters, all in New York or Los Angeles.
Internationally, Alien: Covenant opened big, taking the top spot in nearly 20 countries. The film has its domestic opening this Friday.