The last major weekend of summer starts with a whimper, as If I Stay opens a little soft while Sin City: A Dame to Kill For outright bombs.
It was an "everybody loses" weekend at the box office. There were three wide releases this weekend and none of them made much of an impact. The top new release for Friday is If I Stay, a New Line Cinema/Warner Bros. (Time Warner Inc.) release about a young girl forced to choose between letting herself die and waking up from a coma after a car accident kills her family and leaves her on the brink of "crossing over." The picture, based on a popular young adult melodrama, stars Chloe Moretz and cost just $11 million to produce. To that end, the fact that it's opening just a little smaller than expected is only a minor tragedy. The picture earned $6.8 million on its first Friday, including a $1.1m Thursday gross.
Yes, that's obviously quite a bit less than the $26m opening day of The Fault in Our Stars, but that's a bit like complaining that Divergent didn't open as well as The Hunger Games. It's a soft debut for a small-scale entry, with a probable $17m debut weekend on tap, and I imagine the whole "kids going back to school" thing softened the opening just enough to keep it under $20m. The film earned mixed notices but everyone praised Ms. Moretz and it's beyond refreshing to see young actresses still getting meaty starring vehicles even after they have aged into the "girlfriend/hostage box." Of course, she will be playing an imperiled hooker in Denzel Washington's The Equalizer, but I can roll my eyes a little less as long as there is a bit of variety (like the Lynn Shelton picture Laggies set for October) in the works.
The next big opener isn't Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, but rather Sony's (Sony Corp.) "faith-based" sports drama When the Game Stands Tall. The $15 million football saga stars James Caviezel, Alexander Ludwig, Laura Dern, and Michael Chiklis and was produced by Affirm Films, which brought you the likes of Fire Proof, Facing the Giants, and Soul Surfer. As such, a $3m Friday is unremarkable without being catastrophic as the film hopes for a $10m debut haul. We've had religious-themed films of all stripes this year (essay coming in October) and many of them had solid legs, so there is hope that When the Game Stands Tall, which concern a small town's football team and their 150-game winning streak, could stick around into September.
The third new release is Weinstein/Dimension's Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. The sequel comes nine years after the first Sin City, and it was clearly much too late. The Robert Rodriguez picture, which stars the likes of Eva Green, Josh Brolin, Jessica Alba, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, opened with an outright sad $2.62m Friday, setting the stage for a $7m (at best) debut weekend. The original opened in April of 2005 with a $29m debut weekend and would-be fans have been clamoring for a sequel ever since. The problem is that "the fans" are a small but vocal bunch while the general moviegoers either forgot about the film, didn't like the film, or are now old enough to have jobs, spouses, and kids. Are they interested in a Sin City 2? Maybe. Is it worth paying for a babysitter? Nope.
In holdover news, Guardians of the Galaxy earned $4.83 million on its fourth Friday, down just 32% from last Friday and now with a $239m cume. The Walt Disney/Marvel adventure should earn around $17m, which means it may top the charts by tomorrow. It should surpass the $243m domestic gross of Transformers: Age of Extinction to become summer's biggest grosser by Sunday and should pass Captain America: The Winter Soldier's $257m gross to top all of 2014 sometime next week. Paramount's (Viacom Inc.) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is holding up pretty well too, earning $4.54m on its third Friday, down 43% from last Friday. The Michael Bay-produced reboot should earn around $15.5m for the weekend. More importantly, it should pass the $135m domestic cume of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) by today. 20th Century Fox's Lets Be Cops earned about $3.23m on its second Friday on course for a $10m second weekend (-44%) and a new $44m 12-day cume for the $17m comedy.
Weinstein Company's The Giver earned around $2 million on its second Friday, setting the course for a $6m second weekend (-48%) and a mediocre $23.8m 10-day total for the Meryl Streep/Jeff Bridges YA adaptation. The Expendables 3 dropped like a rock, as frankly expected. Lionsgate's PG-13 action sequel earned just $1.87m on its second Friday, with hopes for an (at best) $6m second weekend (-66% from last weekend's soft debut). The "Sly Stallone and His Amazing Friends" action pic will end the weekend with $27m, or about what The Expendables 2 debuted with over its opening weekend back in 2012. Also of note, Into the Storm earned $1m on Friday (-55%) and should earned around $3m on its third weekend for a $37m cume, while The Hundred-Foot Journey is showing real legs as the adult film of choice with a solid $1.6m Friday and probable $6m third weekend (-23%). It has earned $28.8m thus far.
I'm sorry for the dry Friday report, but there just isn't much happening as summer comes to a close. Join me tomorrow for the weekend estimates and more holdover news. I'll try to make it more exciting, I promise.
