Weekend Box Office: 'Don't Breathe' Wins Final Weekend of Summer

The last weekend of summer delivered a new top movie after three straight weekends of Suicide Squad taking the top spot at the box office. The result wasn't surprising in terms of the movies in the top spot, but the margin by which the newcomer earned the win was unexpected.

The winner of the week was Don't Breathe, the home-invasion horror thriller about a group of young thieves who plan to rob a helpless blind man, only to discover that their target is not at all helpless. The young criminals' fight for their lives forms the core of the scary story.

Don't Breathe was projected in most predictive models to earn somewhere between $10 and $15 million for the weekend, a total that would have put it in a tight race with Suicide Squad for the number-one slot. However, Don't Breathe significantly outperformed expectations to take in more than $26 million, leaving Suicide Squad in the dust.

The DC Comics movie dropped about 42 percent from last weekend to earn just over $12 million for the weekend. While not nearly enough to keep up with Don't Breathe, its gross earnings were enough to keep Suicide Squad firmly in possession of second place, well ahead of last week's holdover Kubo and the Two Strings. That movie took in about $8 million, which represents a small 37 percent drop from last week.

Close behind Kubo and the Two Strings is Sausage Party, the R-rated animated comedy thatdropped 50 percent from last week took in $7.7 million for the weekend. The film's drop to third place comes after it held onto second place behind Suicide Squad over the previous two weekends.

Very close behind Sausage Party is one of this week's new releases, the action thriller Mechanic: Resurrection, with earnings of $7.5 million. The competition for sixth place is even tighter, with holdovers Pete's Dragon and War Dogs both pulling in about $7.3 million.

In fact, all of these numbers are estimates, and less than $700,000 separates the movies currently in third and seventh places. By the time final weekend numbers come in early tomorrow, third through seventh places could experience a total shake-up.

Outside the top five, there is good news and bad news for several holdovers. Both Bad Moms and Jason Bourne continue to perform relatively well after five weeks of release. Each of the films took in over $5 million this weekend, placing them not too far behind the biggest of the newer films. On the other hand, the big-budget flop Ben-Hur tumbled nearly 60 percent this weekend after its horrendous opening weekend last week; the Biblical-historical action movie took in just $4.5 million this weekend, bringing its total domestic gross to only $19.5 million and dropping the movie into tenth place. That's an unqualified disaster for a movie with a production budget in the neighborhood of $100 million.

The last of this week's new wide releases, the boxing biopic Hands of Stone, fared the worst of all the week's new movies and recent holdovers; it took in just $1.7 million and finished in sixteenth place. Hands of Stone, however, had a much more limited release than its competitors, opening in only 810 theaters, and its per-theater gross was comparable to that of most of the films in the top ten.

The lesson of the week seems to be that low-budget horror movies are one of the most reliable bets among all the genres of summer movies, arguably holding their own against superhero movies with giant budgets in terms of return on investment. Don't Breathe has already returned its production budget of $10 million more than two and a half times over in its opening weekend, and even if it doesn't hold particularly well, it's already guaranteed to be considered a success. It follows in the footsteps of other modest hits this summer including The Conjuring 2 and Lights Out, both of which combined low budgets with strong openings to turn a tidy profit for their studios and distributors.

The summer movie season draws to a close this week, as the Labor Day holiday marks the beginning of fall next week. That weekend will see only two new wide releases, the science-fiction thriller Morgan and the period romance The Light Between Oceans. Neither film is expected to win big, with projections having each of them earning somewhere around $7 million for the weekend. The rest of September has only modestly big-name films hitting theaters, including Tom Hanks' Sully on September 9 and Blair Witch on September 16.