Box office hits and misses: Burton’s ‘Miss Peregrine’ tops ‘Deepwater Horizon’

It was a strange weekend at theaters, with Tim Burton’s big-screen adaptation of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children taking the top spot in the box-office charts.

Burton’s live-action film is based on Ransom Riggs’ 2011 book about a teenage boy who gets caught up with a mysterious school for children with special abilities, and the film itself proved to have a special appeal to audiences in its first weekend in theaters. The $28.5 million debut for Miss Peregrine beat fellow new release Deepwater Horizon — a dramatization of the 2010 explosion of the oil rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico — and last week’s Western winner The Magnificent Seven to become the weekend’s highest-grossing film.

It was a moderately successful debut for both of the aforementioned new releases which, for better or worse, ended up earning close to what box-office pundits predicted for both films without surprising anyone with their weekend earnings. Neither film set the critical world on fire, but professional critics and general audiences alike seemed to enjoy both movies.

The only other new release to rank in the weekend’s top ten movies was the comedy Masterminds, which earned a disappointing $6.6 million to go along with generally negative reviews. Even an ensemble cast including Zach Galifianakis, Owen Wilson, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, and Jason Sudeikis wasn’t enough to save the film, which follows an inept group of wannabe criminals attempting to pull off a massive armored-car heist.

This weekend also marked the first week that Suicide Squad didn’t have a top-ten finish. Warner Bros. Pictures’ supervillain team-up movie managed an eight-week run among the weekly top ten, and has amassed more than $320 million in U.S. theaters over that period — a tally that puts it just $10 million shy of Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Also noteworthy was the $8.4 million earned by the biopic Sully over the weekend, which makes it the 14th film starring Tom Hanks in a live-action role to gross over $100 million in U.S. theaters. It’s also the fifth film directed by Clint Eastwood to top that mark domestically.

There’s a good chance we’ll see this week’s top films carry their success over another week, as the next batch of new releases aren’t expected to be blockbusters (but will likely still do well critically and commercially). The thriller The Girl on the Train is the highest-profile movie debuting October 7, with slave-rebellion drama The Birth of a Nation — which was written, produced, and directed by its star, Nate Parker — also expected to have a good run after a celebrated festival run earlier this year.