It’s Christopher Nolan‘s birthday, and the fussy director has a nice present waiting for him when he reads the box office news with his morning cup of tea.
“Dunkirk” has taken the top spot at the box office for the second straight week. Strong reviews and great word of mouth allowed the WWII movie to keep hold at multiplexes, with an impressive week-to-week drop of only 44%. Nolan’s picture added another $28 million domestic to the bottom line this week, and overseas, it’s doing strong business as well, where it currently stands with $131 million. It’s not easy to drop a grown-up movie into the middle of a summer season filled with spandex and sequels, but Nolan has proven once again, if you make a good movie, audiences will show up for original fare.
Currently sitting at 8% at Rotten Tomatoes, “The Emoji Movie” overcame terrible reviews for a $25 million weekend, and early on, it looked like it could take the top spot. I guess parents need to take their kids to see something, and this was the only choice around. Sony will be happy to take what they can get, and the figure is in the ballpark of what Fox‘s “Ice Age: Collision Course” did on its opening weekend last summer. However, that was the fifth film in a franchise, not the first, but while the domestic figures were limp, internationally it did pretty well, and wound up earning $408 million worldwide. So, you can bet Sony will be keeping a strong eye on foreign ticket sales.
READ MORE: Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Detroit’ Is An Uneven But Powerful Docudrama [Review]
Following a SXSW debut, and an extensive marketing campaign by Universal, which included dropping some of the film’s big moments online weeks before it opened, “Atomic Blonde” launched with a rather unremarkable $18 million. It’s not a disaster for the R-rated movie, but certainly not a big hit. The figure bests the $14 million launch of “John Wick,” however, this film cost more ($30 million vs. $20 million), and the prime summer date suggests the studio had higher expectations (it should be noted that Universal essentially wrangled the film from their arthouse shingle Focus Features thinking it had mainstream and franchise viability). For Charlize Theron, it’s the best non-franchise opening of her career, so that’s a bit of a silver lining. It’ll be interesting to see how the film holds, and the good news is that next week’s films — “The Dark Tower” and the forever delayed “Kidnap” — could underperform, leaving “Atomic Blonde” a bit of space to leg out.
In limited release, Kathryn Bigelow‘s “Detroit” did steady business with $365,455 from 20 cinemas for an $18,273 per screen average. However, the big winner at the arthouse was Al Gore‘s “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power” which earned $32,500 across four screens for a total of $130,000. “Brigsby Bear” and “Menashe” did solid business too.
1. “Dunkirk” — $28.1 million ($102.8 mil.)
2. “The Emoji Movie” — $25.6 million
3. “Girls Trip” — $20 million ($65.5 mil.)
4. “Atomic Blonde” — $18.5 million
5. “Spider-Man: Homecoming” — $13.4 million ($278.3 mil.)
6. “War For The Planet Of The Apes” — $10.3 million ($118.6 mil.)
7. “Despicable Me 3” — $7.7 million ($230.4 mil.)
8. “Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets” — $6.8 million ($30.6 mil.)
9. “Baby Driver” — $4 million ($92 mil.)
10. “Wonder Woman” — $3.5 million ($395.4 mil.)