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A Simple Favor.jpg

Box Office Report: Blake Lively's Suit Collection is the Real Winner

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 16, 2018 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 16, 2018 |


A Simple Favor.jpg

Guess who’s back from Toronto?! TIFF was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life and I’m so grateful to have been given the opportunity. Make sure you check out the reviews Joelle and myself wrote while we covered the event. For the record, my favourite films I saw while there were The Sisters Brothers, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Shoplifters, Widows, and Her Smell. And now, back to business as usual.

The Predator topped the box office this weekend as expected, but with a much softer opening than expected by 20th Century Fox. Shane Black’s latest sequel/reboot of the franchise opened in 4000 theatres with a $24m gross. That’s just short of 2010’s Predators, which opened with about $24.76m according to Box Office Mojo. Hell, even The Mummy did better in its opening weekend. Box Office mojo says this gives The Predator the honour of having the worst opening for a live-action film in over 4000 locations. The tepid reviews probably didn’t help, even before we take into consideration franchise fatigue and the drama surrounding Shane Black hiring his registered sex offender friend to be in the film and Olivia Munn being treated like shit for having a problem with that.

The Nun dropped to number two with an $18.2m weekend, which is a massive 66% drop but the film has already made close to 4 times its budget back in domestic grosses so no biggie. Internationally, grosses have taken it past $225m, so expect a sequel or prequel or spin-off to this movie because that’s how The Conjuring franchise will live forever.

Opening at number 3 is A Simple Favor, which took in $16m from 3100 locations. That’s pretty solid, especially for an R-rated thriller not based on a major property. Good reviews helped, and so did Blake Lively’s suits. The budget was about $20m, so this making anything upwards of $30m would be good numbers in Lionsgate’s favour.

Just behind that at number four is White Boy Rick. True story, literally every ad break I saw while watching Canadian T.V. featured a spot for this movie. Every. Single. One. No hyperbole. This one was pushed hard, so it’s surprising to me that it has opened so soft. Audiences weren’t wild for it and neither were critics, so maybe there’s just fatigue for this familiar plot. An $8.8m opening weekend is nothing to sneeze at, especially from 2500 locations, but that’s only a slice more than Crazy Rich Asians made in its 5th weekend (that one is so close to passing $150m domestically).

Jennifer Garner’s Peppermint fell from 2 to 6, a 54% drop in gross, giving it only $6m in its second week. It’s close to making back its budget domestically but it does highlight how this kind of film is really only designed to last a couple of weeks at the box office. This isn’t a long haul effort.

The other new release in the top 10 this week is Unbroken: Path to Redemption, an unofficial sequel to Angelina Jolie’s movie about Louis Zamperini. This one is a Pure Flix effort and focuses on his born again Christianity after he returned home from being a POW in Japan. It’s actually a really interesting story, one I’m sad Jolie’s film didn’t cover, but it wasn’t one I wanted to see the God’s Not Dead people make. Anyway, it seems that nobody else did either as it only brought in $2.35m, about half of what Box Office Mojo had predicted.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout has made $216m domestically, making it officially the biggest release in the franchise. With $760m internationally, it’s currently the 5th biggest film of 2018, ahead of Deadpool 2 but miles behind Incredibles 2. So far, four films have made over $1bn worldwide and one has made over $2bn. Three guesses as to which film that one is and the other two guesses don’t count.

In limited release this weekend, Amma Asante’s Where Hands Touch made $70k from 103 locations, which isn’t stellar but that’s also a plot a lot of people really don’t want much to do with in the current climate. By comparison, Kristen Stewart and Chloe Sevigny’s Lizzie made just under $50k from 4 locations. A new A24 release, The Children Act with Emma Thompson, made $20k from 3 locations.

This coming week will see a limited release for The Sisters Brothers (it’s great, go see it) as well as the much talked about Assassination Nation. Wide releases will go to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9, Eli Roth’s first kids movie, The House with a Clock in its Walls, and Life Itself, which was sold to me at TIFF as 2018’s Collateral Beauty. Eek.

You can check out the rest of the weekend box office here.

What films did you watch this weekend? Any questions about TIFF? Am I the only one still rooting for Solo: A Star Wars Story? Let us know in the comments.



Header Image Source: Lionsgate