It was a scary holiday weekend at the box office, with last week’s champion Don’t Breathe reigning supreme once again across the four-day span.
Director Fede Alvarez’s thriller stayed strong in its second week, and led a long list of returning films that raked in the lion’s share of holiday ticket sales. The film, which follows a group of would-be thieves who discover that the blind man they tried to rob has some deadly secrets, is now the first horror movie since 2014’s Ouija to win the weekend box office for two weeks straight.
It was a relatively good holiday weekend for second-place finisher Suicide Squad, too. The supervillain team-up movie moved past 2013’s Man of Steel both domestically and worldwide to become the second-highest grossing film in the studio’s DC Comics cinematic universe (also known as the DC Extended Universe). Suicide Squad is now just $30 million shy of the mark set by franchise leader Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice in U.S. theaters, but $200 million shy of the worldwide total for Dawn of Justice.
| # | Title | Four-Day Weekend | U.S. Total | Worldwide Total |
| 1. | Don’t Breathe | $19.5M | $54.9M | $63.5M |
| 2. | Suicide Squad | $12.8M | $300.2M | $675.7M |
| 3. | Pete’s Dragon | $8.5M | $66.3M | $94.9M |
| 4. | Kubo and the Two Strings | $8.5M | $36.4M | $41.8M |
| 5. | Sausage Party | $6.5M | $89.6M | $103.6M |
| 6. | War Dogs | $6M | $36.5M | $51.7M |
| 7. | Bad Moms | $6M | $103.7M | $141.7M |
| 8. | The Light Between Oceans | $5.9M | $5.9M | $5.9M |
| 9. | Hell or High Water | $5.6M | $15.7M | $15.7M |
| 10. | Mechanic: Resurrection | $5.5M | $15.7M | $15.7M |
As for the weekend’s new releases, romantic drama The Light Between Oceans was the only premiere to break the weekend’s top ten films, earning an estimated $5.9 million from 1,500 theaters. The dark, sci-fi thriller Morgan — the only other new release to generate much buzz heading into its opening weekend — seemed to miss the mark entirely with a meager $2.4 million debut across 2,020 theaters. The film’s poor reviews probably aren’t going to help it recover from that disappointing premiere, but its relatively low $8 million production cost makes it less of a flop than it might otherwise have been.
Next weekend brings one of the first major releases of the fall movie season, with Tom Hanks taking on the role of famous US Airways Flight 1549 pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger in Sully, which chronicles the days leading up to and following the famous emergency landing of the Airbus A320 airliner in the Hudson River after disaster strikes and the plane’s engines are disabled three minutes after takeoff. Clint Eastwood directs the film, which is based on Sullenberger’s autobiography Highest Duty.
