Skip to main content

Box office hits and misses: James Bond and Charlie Brown reign supreme for another week

SPECTRE
Given the lack of significant competition at the box office, it should probably come as no surprise that the top two films remained the same for the second week in a row.

Spectre, the 24th installment of the James Bond franchise, continued its box-office dominance with a $35.4 million weekend in the U.S. that brought the film’s total worldwide gross to more than $543 million. The film’s impressive pace has put it right behind 2012’s Skyfall as far as earnings go, but it’s still trailing behind all three of Daniel Craig’s other adventures as Agent 007 from a critical standpoint. Given the underwhelming reviews, it will be interesting to see how long Spectre can keep up its momentum.

The most successful new movie of the weekend was the ensemble film Love the Coopers, a holiday comedy with a cast that includes Alan Arkin, John Goodman, Ed Helms, Diane Keaton, Anthony Mackie, Amanda Seyfried, Marisa Tomei, and Olivia Wilde. The film earned a decent $8.4 million for the weekend, but it’s ridiculously poor reviews could get in the way of its extremely holiday-friendly theme when audiences are deciding which movie to check out with the family.

# Title Weekend U.S. Total Worldwide Total
1. Spectre $35.4M $130.7M $543.8M
2. The Peanuts Movie $24.2M $82.5M $90.6M
3. Love the Coopers $8.4M $8.4M $8.4M
4. The Martian $6.7M $207.4M $477.9M
5. The 33 $5.9M $5.9M $18.5M
6. Goosebumps $4.7M $73.5M $103.2M
7. Bridge of Spies $4.3M $61.7M $80.9M
8. Prem Ratan Dhan Payo $2.4M $2.8M $33.9M
9. Hotel Transylvania 2 $2.4M $165.2M $417.8M
10. The Last Witch Hunter $1.5M $26.1M $84.9M

The other big film to make its debut over the weekend was the Chilean miner drama The 33, which opened to the tune of $5.9 million and received positive reviews from critics and general audiences alike. The dramatization of the infamous 2010 mining accident stars Antonio Banderas, Lou Diamond Phillips, Rodrigo Santoro, Juliette Binoche, and Gabriel Byrne, and only ended up with a per-theater average of $2,386 for the weekend — not exactly a major success, but not a total flop.

One of the more surprising films to find its way into the weekend’s top-ten movies was the Bollywood musical Prem Ratan Dhan Payo (“I Received A Treasure Called Love”), which had a $2.4 million debut in the U.S. on its way to becoming the fourth-biggest opening of all time for a Bollywood movie in North America. The film also set a new opening-weekend record in India with its $8.61 million debut.

While it fell well outside the weekend’s top 10 films, the Oscar-friendly drama Spotlight expanded into 60 theaters ahead of its wide release next weekend. So far, the film has earned $1.8 million from extremely limited screenings, but is quickly becoming a film many expect to challenge The Martian for top honors when Academy Award season rolls around.

The upcoming weekend’s biggest release will certainly be The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, the much-anticipated conclusion of The Hunger Games franchise. Along with that surefire blockbuster, the weekend also features the debuts of Tom Hardy’s dual-role gangster drama Legend and the raunchy holiday comedy The Night Before, starring Seth Rogen, Anthony Mackie, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Editors' Recommendations

Rick Marshall
A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…
Box office hits and misses: ‘Wonder Woman’ buries ‘The Mummy’ with heroic second week
Wonder Woman

Not even Tom Cruise battling one of the most famous movie monsters of all time was enough to slow the momentum of Wonder Woman, which easily topped new release The Mummy over the weekend.

Director Patty Jenkins' cinematic superhero story added another $57.1 million to its impressive domestic earnings so far, dropping a mere 45 percent from its opening weekend. The film -- which earned overwhelmingly positive reviews from professional critics and general audiences -- earned more in its second week than fellow Warner Bros. Pictures releases Suicide Squad and Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice, putting it in good position to rake in quite a bit more money in the weeks to come.

Read more
Box office hits and misses: ‘Pirates’ opens low but pushes Disney past $1B
Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Men Tell No Tales

It was good news and bad news for Disney over the four-day Memorial Day holiday weekend.

On the positive side, the $77 million opening for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales pushed the studio past the $1 billion mark domestically, giving it the second-fastest run to that mark in industry history. The only studio to hit the mark faster was, well ... Disney, which crossed $1 billion in early May last year.

Read more
Box office hits and misses: ‘Alien: Covenant’ narrowly beats ‘Guardians’ with weak debut
box office alien covenant still 6

Ridley Scott's acid-blooded xenomorphs mauled their way to the top of the box office over the weekend with Alien: Covenant, but it wasn't the sort of premiere 20th Century Fox hoped for from the film.

Scott's follow-up to the polarizing 2012 prequel film Prometheus underperformed in both its opening weekend numbers and reviews, earning just $36 million in U.S. theaters and receiving just a "B" grade on audience-driven survey site CinemaScore. For reference, audiences gave recent films The Great Wall and Ghost in the Shell the same grade, so it's not exactly a ringing endorsement from ticket buyers.

Read more