Aside from How to Train Your Dragon’s continued dominance at the worldwide box-office, this weekend felt like a tough one to call. How would Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 23 years in the making horror-sequel fare when released smack-bang in the middle of blockbuster season, and what would happen to Disney-Pixar’s $150 million sci-fi adventure Elio in the face of high-earning holdovers like Lilo & Stitch? Keep reading for the answers.
Universal’s live-action adaptation of DreamWorks Animations’ How to Train Your Dragon easily topped the weekend chart with $37 million domestic, taking its North American tally to $160.5 million, and its worldwide gross to $358.2 million.
With that out of the way, the more interesting box-office stories can be found in the performance of two of the new wide-releases this weekend.
28 Years Later shot out of the blocks with Thursday night previews of $5.3 million, leading to projections somewhere around the $45 million mark, but it appears that word-of-mouth might be affecting Danny Boyle’s sublime sequel, with the film finishing its domestic bow with $30 million for the 3-day-frame. That’s a figure which was matched overseas, where the surprising sequel earned another $30 million for a worldwide cume of $60 million.
That covers the production and advertising costs of the movie, so fans will be hoping that the film has some legs, because although a Nia DaCosta-directed sequel – The Bone Temple – is already in the can, the third installment, which Boyle has said will bring back Cillian Murphy’s Jim, all depends on how well the first two perform at the box-office. All being said, that was still a very good opening, matching the entire domestic run of the 2002 original, which tapped out at $28 million.
It was a different story for Pixar’s Elio, which posted the studio’s worst opening weekend ever with a dismal $21 million. Things weren’t much better for the science-fiction adventure overseas, where it limped to just $14 million, for a worldwide gross of just $35 million.
Elsewhere, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning continued to hold on stronger than Tom Cruise does to the undercarriage of that bi-plane by earning $6.6 million, and in doing-so it took the Paramount blockbuster beyond the North American gross of its predecessor ($172M). M:I 8 currently stands at $179.4 million domestic, and a worldwide total of $540.9 million.
As always, let us know what you spent your money on at the box-office this weekend by heading to our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
