Box Office: Summer Winding Down

The end of August means the end of the summer movie season with kids going to school and adults ending their planned vacations. The box office numbers this past weekend were definitely deflated because of this with just one film making more than $10 million. That film is The Expendables 2 which made $13.4 million with its total at $52.2 million in its second week. Matching its predecessor's tally let alone its own budget of over $100 million will be asking for too much.

None of the new openers cracked the Top 5 with Joseph Gordon Levitt's Premium Rush doing the best with $6 million good for only 8th place. Hit and Run was 10th with $4.5 million, but with a $2 million budget, it's already exceeded expectations. The critically-panned The Apparition opened in 12th place with $2.8 million. In very limited release, IFC's Sleepwalk with Me mustered $68,800 in just one theater.

In slightly better news, most of the top holdovers held well such as last week's family film newcomers ParaNorman and The Odd Life of Timothy Green. Meryl Streep's Hope Spring had one of the best drops in the top 10 putting its tally at a respectable $44.8 million. But it was anti-Obama documentary 2016 Obama's America that was the big news of the weekend placing 8th with $6.5 million, a 420% increased from the weekend before, after it added more than 900 theaters just in time for the Republican Convention. The documentary is already the highest-grossing conservative document of all time and is ranked #17 for all documentaries. For my part, I ended up seeing ParaNorman with a friend and we both found it quite delightful.