Suicide Squad Stays #1 at Box Office

For the weekend of August 12-14, 2016, Suicide Squad easily held on to the top spot. After breaking the August opening-weekend box-office record, its 67% drop was to be expected. Its worldwide gross is now past $465 million, and this is before opening in lucrative countries like China, India, Germany and Japan. (For comparison, China alone was responsible for $190 million of Captain America: Civil War's $1.15 billion).

Sausage Party's tracking grew the closer it came, and when the overwhelmingly positive reviews came in, its success was assured. It also only had a $19 million production budget, which just makes me wonder why it took $105 million to make Ice Age 5.

Pete's Dragon opened to okay business, but it'll need good word-of-mouth and strong overseas performance to make a profit, and Disney could use some better news after Alice Through the Looking Glass and The BFG flopped. (Don't weep for them just yet. They also had Zootopia, The Jungle Book, CA:CW, and Finding Dory).

Florence Foster Jenkins joins Ricki & the Flash as an example that late summer Meryl Streep is no longer as bankable as she'd been in years past (with titles like Mamma Mia!, Julie & Julia and Hope Springs).

On fewer screens, Anthropoid wasn't able to garner much interest. It may look like a sci-fi title, but it's about the two men who carried out the assassination of SS Nazi monster Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. It stars Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders) and Jamie Dornan (Battlestar Galactica).

Hell or High Water came out of nowhere for the highest per-screen average of over $18,000 on 32 screens for a $592,000 total. It's a modern-day Western starring Jeff Bridges as a sheriff on the trail of two bank robbers (Chris Pine, Ben Foster). Expect it to expand in the next week or so.

Opens August 19
KUBO & THE TWO STRINGS with the voices of Charlize Theron and Matthew McConaughey.
WAR DOGS with Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Bradley Cooper, Ana de Armas and Shaun Toub.
BEN-HUR with Jack Huston, Morgan Freeman, Toby Kebbell and Ayelet Zurer.