Weekend Box Office: Turtle Power is Barely Enough
by EG
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows won the box-office competition this weekend, but it did so in a very unspectacular fashion. The kid-friendly sequel outpaced X-Men: Apocalypse to take the number-one spot, but the Turtles didn't perform nearly as well as some observers thought they might.
The sequel to 2014's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles took in about $35 million for the weekend, or barely more than half as much as the original film earned in its opening weekend. The movie's weekend gross was a disappointment, but it was still enough to best the second weekend of X-Men: Apocalypse, which dropped a steep 66% from its opening weekend and earned only $22 million this week.
Third place went to Me Before You, Emilia Clarke's romantic drama. That film performed better than expected despite lukewarm reviews; audiences seem to like it, and it raked in a surprising $18 million in ticket sales.
On the other hand, the week's third new release, Popstar: Never Stop Stopping, didn't click with audiences even though critics, for the most part, enjoyed it. The Andy Samberg comedy earned only $4.6 million for the weekend and landed in eighth place.
The last two spots in the top five went to holdovers Alice Through the Looking Glass and The Angry Birds Movie.