Weekend Box Office: 'Morgan' Crashes, 'Don't Breathe' Reigns
by EG
No one expected the Labor Day weekend to be especially lucrative for any of the movies currently in theaters, but the holiday turned out to be even worse than predicted for several films. One of the week's new releases had an especially rough weekend, and the week's top movie remained the same as it was last week.
The highest-grossing movie of the week was Don't Breathe, the home-invasion thriller that also took the top spot last weekend. The film was on track to take in about $17 million over the four-day holiday weekend, a respectably strong hold from last weekend's $26-million take. Even before the beginning of the weekend, Don't Breathe had already earned nearly $40 million domestically. Not bad for a movie with a $10-million production budget.
For the second weekend in a row, Suicide Squad took second place. The superhero film gave up the top spot to Don't Breathe last weekend after three consecutive weeks on top, but Suicide Squad has been hanging on surprisingly well. Despite terrible critical reviews and lukewarm reaction for many early audiences, the film has remained a solid performer over the past month. This weekend its domestic gross will surpass $300 million.
Suicide Squad sits firmly in the eighth position on the list of 2016's top-grossing films, and, interestingly, it now has its sights set on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which is currently in seventh place. With just a couple more strong weeks, Suicide Squad could move past the tentpole that was arguably supposed to be the bigger of Warner Bros. DC Comics movies this year. If that happens, Suicide Squad will be the third biggest superhero movie of the year, behind Captain America: Civil War and Deadpool.
Through the early part of the weekend, the rest of the top ten was a tight race between a full stable of hold-overs. Disney's family film Pete's Dragon was likely to take third place with a projected gross of about $9 million, although another family film, the animated Kubo and the Two Strings, is close behind and will either fall into fourth place or squeak by into third.
After that, the margins are narrow between the films vying for fifth through tenth place. The comedies Bad Moms and Sausage Party are both on a pace to bring in about $6.5 million; the former will surpass $100 million domestically this week, making it the hottest R-rated comedy of the year so far.
Hell or High Water, War Dogs, Jason Bourne and the newcomer The Light Between Oceans are all set to bring in somewhere between $5 and $6 million over the four-day weekend. That's a disappointing performance for The Light Between Oceans, which was hoping for something closer to $7 million.
The biggest disappointment of the weekend, however, is Morgan, the sci-fi thriller that some thought could challenge Don't Breathe for the top spot. Instead, the film is on track to take in a miserable $2.3 million for the weekend, putting it on the list of worst wide-release openings of all time. Not only is it not a contender for the number-one slot, it won't even come close to making it into the top ten. Expect it to land in 17th place behind Finding Dory and the summer's biggest big-budget bomb, Ben-Hur.
Morgan can take some consolation that sports biopic Hands of Stone, which is expanding this week after opening last week in a smaller number of theaters, is doing even worse. Hands of Stone will only earn about $1.7 million for the weekend.
Next weekend, the fall movie season will start in earnest, and although there are no summer-style blockbusters on the schedule, the weekend is likely to feel a little less sleepy than this one.
A new horror film, Blair Witch, will enter theaters to challenge the supremacy of Don't Breathe; the sequel to 1999's The Blair Witch Project made a surprise debut at this summer's Comic Con, and it's getting solid review from both critics and audiences ahead of its wide public release. Also new next week will be another sequel; Bridget Jones's Baby is a follow-up to 2001's Bridget Jones's Diary and 2004's Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason. Both of those new films should be able to outpace both Don't Breathe and Suicide Squad, but at this point, it's unclear which of them will come out on top.
