Weekend Box Office: 'Ben-Hur' Bombs Big, 'Suicide Squad' Repeats

This weekend at the box office was expected to be a weak one for the week's new releases, and in that respect, the weekend went exactly as projected. The new release with the biggest budget turned out to be arguably the biggest flop of the summer, but the other two movies performed well enough to challenge the strongest of the hold-overs from last week.

The big news story of the weak was the spectacular failure of the historical epic Ben-Hur. The flashy adventure flick from the director of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter came to theaters with a production budget of about $100 million and very little pre-release interest from moviegoers. MGM and Paramount, the movie's co-producing studios, promoted the film as a faith-based story in an effort to draw Christian moviegoers to theaters, and that effort was helped by the involvement of Christian producers Roma Downey and Mark Burnett.

The faithful didn't turn out for the film, though. Early estimates put Ben-Hur's weekend take at around $11 million, less than half the opening-weekend earnings of Exodus: Gods and Kings, the most recent high-profile Biblical-historical box-office bomb. It probably didn't help that the story of a Roman charioteer doesn't have an obviously Christian theme for moviegoers who aren't already familiar with the tale.

First place for the weekend will go to Suicide Squad, which turned in a surprisingly strong performance in its third weekend of release. After falling off a steep 69 percent last weekend, the supervillain/hero flick held on to nearly half its last-weekend audience this time around. Its estimated $20 million take is a bit ahead of projections, and it was enough to keep the film at the top of the charts. Suicide Squad's three-week run at the top, in fact, makes it one of the most long-lived winners of the year so far.

The battle for second place is tighter, as last week's number two, the R-rated animated comedy Sausage Party, engaged in a duel with this week's new comedy/drama War Dogs. The latter film did a good job pulling in young men who had already seen Suicide Squad and Sausage Party, and its earnings for the weekend will be about $14.3 million. According to estimates, that's slightly behind Sausage Party, which should take in about $15.3 million by the end of the weekend. That number marks a drop-off of about 55 percent for Sausage Party, which isn't too bad for a comedy's second weekend.

Fourth place for the weekend will almost certainly go to the week's third new new release, the family-oriented animated film Kubo and the Two Strings. Given that Disney's Pete's Dragon, now in its second week of release, hasn't managed to resonate particularly well with family audiences, Kubo had little trouble staying in the thick of fight near the top of the charts. The film's estimated $12.6 million should put it solidly ahead of the two films that are bringing up the rear of the top five.

Those two films are the previously mentioned Ben-Hur and Pete's Dragon. As of early Sunday, the two movies were locked in a very tight race for fifth place, with estimates putting the total weekend gross for each film at $11.3 million. That's not good news for either of them. Pete's Dragon disappointed in its debut last week, and even if its hold for this week was decent, it started from a position of significant disadvantage. With a total domestic gross so far of less than $42 million, Pete's Dragon represents a rare misfire for Disney so far in 2016.

The news for Ben-Hur is even worse, though. A finish outside the top five, which is still possible at this point, is a disaster for a movie with the kind of production budget that this one had. The failure is all the more spectacular since Ben-Hur is the final big-budget release of the summer - next week, during the final weekend before Labor Day, the three new releases are all modest in scale and aspirations - and as such, the movie was in the spotlight more than it would have been on a busier mid-summer weekend.

The summer movie season comes to an end next week with the release of the horror thriller Don't Breathe, the action thriller Mechanic: Resurrection, and the boxing biopic Hands of Stone. Of the three, Don't Breathe is the most likely to come out on top, but there will likely be another messy battle for position behind it among the full slate of hold-overs.