The Expendables 2 Takes #1 at Weak Box Office

Last week’s The Expendables 2 held on to its #1 spot at the box office again this week, in part because no major film opened Friday.No new film made more than $10 million this weekend, with a documentary made by right-wing activists cracking the top ten in its first week of wide release (it’s been in limited release and building buzz for a few weeks now) and all of the films in the top five carrying over from earlier weeks. Even 2016: Obama’s America, which broke the record for the best opening weekend by a conservative documentary, sputtered in the second half and dropped from fourth place early Saturday to eighth place by the end of the weekend as few people made it to theaters and the breadth of releases seems to have made the difference.The Expendables 2 topped the list, with a $13 million weekend, followed by The Bourne Legacy at $9.5 million in the #2 spot. Bourne will likely break $100 million this week (it’s got a total domestic gross of around $86 million) but will do little more than that before the end of the summer. ParaNorman took in $8.7 million to remain the top family film, with The Dark Knight Rises weighing in at $7.3 million and Disney’s The Odd Life of Timothy Green rounding out the top five with $7.2 million.The top-grossing new film this week came in at #6, with Sony’s Premium Rush making $6.5 million over the weekend. Hit and Run, which has received strong reviews and great audience reaction, nevertheless barely made it into the top ten, taking home tenth place and $4.3 million.Next week should be another story, though; Labor Day weekend is traditionally a decent weekend for movies, being perceived by many as “the last weekend of the summer,” and two promising films–Tom Hardy and Shia LaBoeuf’s Lawless and Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s The Possession–will open wide. Both of those are R-rated and neither is likely to open higher than $25 million or so, but the holiday foot traffic combined with a couple of new films for the first time in two weeks ought to pump a touch of life into the box office.