New Movie Releases Sept. 6-8: 'Riddick' Goes It Alone

Labor Day has come and gone, summer, at least from a commercial perspective, is officially over, and the weekend ahead is set to be one of the quietest of the year at the box office. The quiet is well deserved, coming as it does after one of the most tumultuous summer seasons in recent Hollywood memory.

The only new wide release this week is the sci-fi action flick "Riddick," a sequel to "Pitch Black" (2000) and "The Chronicles of Riddick" (2004). Like those films, "Riddick" stars Vin Diesel as an escaped convict who must avoid galactic bounty hunters. The film will probably benefit from the lack of competition, but given its 65%-fresh Rotten Tomatoes rating and the modest performance of the first two films in the franchise, "Riddick" is unlikely to be a blockbuster.

The subdued tone of this weekend was foreshadowed last weekend, when "The Butler" won the box-office race for the third week in a row, taking the top spot from the teen-idol flick "One Direction: This Is Us" and the widely panned thriller "Getaway." "One Direction" started the long holiday weekend strong but faded quickly once its almost exclusively tween-age female audience had bought all its tickets.

The summer of 2013 was a big one for Hollywood, with record box-office grosses and an unusually large number of big-budget flops. Movie-goers spent a huge amount of money—$4.76 billion—to see movies, but unfortunately studios also spent a huge amount of money to make them. The budget of one film, "The Lone Ranger," was nearly a quarter of a billion dollars all by itself, and 18 films released this summer had budgets of over $100 million dollars.