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Box Office Weekend – ‘Equalizer’ Hits the Target While ‘Mamma Mia!’ Hits a High Note

by · July 23, 2018

Box Office
In this weekend’s box office report, two new releases do roughly as well as one another in the penultimate July weekend. While Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! was expected to top the charts, The Equalizer 2 lived up to its name and closed the distance, ultimately prevailing.

 

Equalizer 2 more than equaled the opening of the original film ($34M+ versus the sequel’s near-$36M over the same period of time), which is an impressive feat considering that the sequel was expected to open to a mere $26M. Denzel Washington’s star power can be thanked for the overperformance, as the movie represents his third-biggest opening after American Gangster ($43M+) and Safe House ($40M+). Sony has plenty to be happy about this weekend, as their other big movie this month – Hotel Transylvania 3 – held on pretty well with an under-48% drop. Between those two hits and a two other movies, Sony had 36.3% of the weekend’s box office share.

 

But that’s not to say that Universal is unhappy with how their weekend came out, either. Mamma Mia! 2 managed to top the first film’s $27M+ weekend with a $34M+ haul (unadjusted for inflation, of course). While the weekend is a bit on the front-loaded side of things, that shouldn’t be much of a problem if the movie can prove to be leggy and the international rollout proves to be strong. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is close to a global total of $1.2B as well as the movie’s rollout wraps up. There’s even a bit of a silver lining for Skyscraper, which while a domestic dud, managed to drop less than expected domestically (56% compared to the expected 60%, although neither drops would be considered all that great considering that it opened below expectations), and the overseas gross has been bolstered by a $48M opening in China. Overall, Universal had 38.7% of the weekend’s box office share with these three movies and two Blumhouse projects (The First Purge and Unfriended: Dark Web).

 

Speaking of studios that are having a pretty good time right about now, Disney wins out in this trifecta with Ant-Man and the Wasp‘s third weekend drop of under 45% making up for a 60%+ drop in the second weekend, a rarity for the studio. The drops on both weekends (61.6% and 44.6%) are less than the ones that Spider-Man: Homecoming faced (62.2% and 49.9%). While the Ant-Man and Wasp team-up probably won’t leg out as much as that Spider-Man movie did, it does mean that there’s a real chance that the movie can top $200M domestically. The movie has a handful of foreign markets to still open up in as well, so a $600M to $700M global total is not out of the question.

 

Meanwhile, Incredibles 2 holds on amazingly well with a sub-30% drop. The film is nearly past the $1B mark globally, with a bunch of markets still waiting to open; suffice to say, the movie is on-track to be Pixar’s most lucrative sequel, and they’ll probably be having conversations about a third film in short order if they haven’t started them already. Oh, and Disney put Black Panther in a few dozen more theaters this weekend, in the hopes of getting the movie past $700M domestically (which it is very, very close to clearing, provided that it remains open in most of those theaters for another weekend or three). Disney’s box office share for the weekend was 16.9%.

 

The Top Twelve for the three-day weekend can be summarized as follows (bolded titles are new releases):

  1. The Equalizer 2 (Sony Pictures) – $35.825M Total.
  2. Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! (Universal Pictures) – $34.38M Total.
  3. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (Sony Pictures) – $23.15M Weekend/$91.089M Total; 47.5% Drop.
  4. Ant-Man and the Wasp (Disney/Marvel Studios) – $16.126M Weekend/$164.624M Total; 44.6% Drop.
  5. Incredibles 2 (Disney/Pixar) – $11.52M Weekend/$557.335M Total; 29.2% Drop.
  6. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Universal Pictures) – $11.005M Weekend/$383.904M Total; 32.1% Drop.
  7. Skyscraper (Universal/Legendary Pictures) – $10.96M Weekend/$46.749M Total; 56% Drop.
  8. The First Purge (Universal Pictures/Blumhouse Productions) – $4.98M Weekend/$60.191M Total; 46.5% Drop.
  9. Unfriended: Dark Web (Universal Pictures/Blumhouse Productions) – $3.495M Total.
  10. Sorry to Bother You (Annapurna Pictures) – $2.823M Weekend/$10.252M Total; 32.9% Drop.
  11. Sicario: Day of the Soldado (Sony Pictures) – $1.88M Weekend/$47.085M Total; 51.6% Drop.
  12. Ocean’s 8 (Warner Bros.) – $1.575M Weekend/$135.639M Total; 45.8% Drop.

Ocean’s 8, Incredibles 2, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Skyscraper, and The Equalizer 2 are now playing in theaters.

 

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