Weekend Box Office: Go, and Sin No More

On the fourth weekend of their release, those a-holes known as the Guardians of the Galaxy jumped back to the top of the box office with $17.6 million, shoving aside a lot of newer competition to get there. Who saw this coming?

Marvel’s misfit intergalactic superheroes also crossed another landmark this weekend. ‘Guardians of the Galaxy‘ became the #1 movie of summer, earning a total of $251.8 million domestically. By next weekend, it will be the #1 movie of 2014, passing the $259.8 million earned by ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’.

For the second weekend in a row, three new wide releases were unable to defeat the Top 2: ‘Guardians’ and ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles‘. ‘Guardians’ was able to re-claim the top spot by slipping only 30% in attendance. ‘Ninja Turtles’ didn’t have quite the same success. It slid 41%, but still did well with $16.8 million. To date, the reboot has earned $145.6 million domestically.

The strongest of the three wide releases was Chloe Moretz’s teen melodrama ‘If I Stay‘. The sappy YA adaptation grossed $16.3 million. Teen girls fueled its decent earnings this weekend, but ‘Stay’ will likely go sooner rather than later. Movies like this have a limited, front-loaded appeal for a small demographic.

Fourth place went to ‘Let’s Be Cops‘, which dropped only 38% in attendance with another $11 million. Since its mid-week debut nearly two weeks ago, the $17 million R-rated comedy has earned a solid $45.2 million.

Rounding out the Top 5 was the barely advertised sports drama ‘When the Game Stands Tall‘. The based-on-a-true-story football tale scored $9 million, which is about par for the genre these days.

Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller bit the black & white bullet as ‘Sin City: A Dame to Kill For‘ tanked at the box office. The sequel’s $6.4 million debut landed in the #8 spot. In comparison, the original ‘Sin City‘ opened to $29.1 million in 2005 without the additional help of 3D ticket prices. It’s a tragedy to see the follow-up to an amazing movie perform so poorly, but taking too long to churn out the sequel and a half-assed final product are mostly likely to blame for the awful opening.

The opening weekend numbers for limited release ‘To Be Takei’ have yet to be announced.

Top 10:

1. ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ (Buena Vista) – $17,631,000

2. ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ (Paramount) – $16,800,000

3. ‘If I Stay’ (Warner Bros.) – $16,355,000

4. ‘Let’s Be Cops’ (Fox) – $11,000,000

5. ‘When the Game Stands Tall’ (TriStar) – $9,000,000

6. ‘The Giver’ (Weinstein) – $6,730,000

7. ‘The Expendables 3’ (Lionsgate) – $6,600,000

8. ‘Sin City: A Dame to Kill For’ (Weinstein) – $6,477,000

9. ‘The Hundred-Foot Journey’ (Buena Vista) – $5,562,000

10. ‘Into the Storm’ (Warner Bros.) – $3,800,000

8 comments

  1. I can’t believe not a single movie has crossed the 300 million mark domestically this far into the the year. I’m wondering if it will even happen at all. Could Guardians do it? I feel like it could come close, but probably not. Talk about theater attendance being down!

  2. Well, I’m happy for my brother. They did a betting pool as to what the highest grossing summer movie would be and he picked Guardians so congrats to him. A big whopping 77 bucks.

  3. I’m really surprised that Let’s Be Cops is doing as well as it is. Considering everything going on in Missouri right now, I wouldn’t think that this would be a good time for a comedy about police.

      • Good point. What about ‘Tron’ versus ‘Tron Legacy’? ‘Tron’ isn’t/wasn’t a big franchise when ‘Legacy’ opened (which subsequently made $400 million worldwide).

        • William Henley

          Yes, but didn’t the original movie bomb pretty hard too?

          Wasn’t there like an 8 year span between Terminator and Terminator 2? Seven year for Alien and Aliens.

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