Weekend Box Office Report

It took 20 years for Roland Emmerich to deliver a sequel to Independence Day, a film that’s largely responsible for the modern summer blockbuster season. Unfortunately, it looks like most audiences didn’t think it was worth the wait. As predicted in recent weeks, Resurgence crash-landed in theaters with an underwhelming opening weekend that was no match for Pixar’s Finding Dory.

Honestly, we could have just copied and pasted last weekend’s box office report and gotten away with it. Outside of the shifting numbers, the order of the top 10 is almost identical to what it was a week ago. This is Hollywood in a holding pattern. The weekend after Thanksgiving is a wasteland. That’s probably why ‘The Pyramid’ was dumped this weekend. However, the lone newcomer in the top 10 didn’t just bomb, it bombed spectacularly.

There‘s going to be a lot of blood and ink spilled across the internet on the subject of the opening weekend for ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1.’ Yes, the third film in the series did open significantly lower than its predecessors. Yes, there are definitely people at Lionsgate wringing their hands and trying to figure out why the film opened below expectations. And yet, that opening weekend is still massive. It’s three day total is larger than most movies ever have a chance to make in their entire runs. So, let's have some perspective as we dive into this week’s top 10.

It feels like common sense: of course the horror movie released a week before Halloween is going to win the weekend war at the box office over the action movie. And yet, most horror movies continue to get released as far away from the season of the witch as possible. Can the recent success of 'Annabelle' and this weekend's 'Ouija' change that?