Vin Diesel's passion project Riddick topped this weekend, with $18.7 million, a decline from the $23 million opening of the last film, The Chronicles of Riddick, back in 2004, and nothing compared to the $39 million opening of Pitch Black in 2000. It also received a "B" Cinemascore, which is pretty unremarkable, so the legs on this one won't be strong, but it's something of an improvement compared to the last movie, which cost over $100 million to produce and bombed harder, while Diesel raised the $38 million for this one himself over the last several years, so it earned back half its budget at least in one weekend.
The Butler took second place with $8.9 million, amassing a total of $91 million and set to cross $100 by next week. It's a decent sized hit, even if it didn't play as well as The Help did a couple of years ago. Last week's surprise hit Instructions Not Included, expanded wider and made $8 million, which gives the film a total of $20 million after only ten days and puts it on track to become the biggest Spanish-language hit of all time in the U.S., likely surpassing Pan's Labyrinth's $37 million total.
- Riddick- $18.7 million
- Lee Daniels' The Butler- $8.9 million
- Instructions Not Included- $8.1 million
- We're the Millers- $7.9 million
- Planes- $4.3 million
You might notice the top 5 has been pretty stable for the last few weeks, with a lot of the same movies showing up over and over again, which usually happens as summer season winds down. It's to the benefit of movies like Planes and We're the Millers (which continues its success story, totaling $123 million so far). Last week's winner, One Direction: This is Us, fell off a cliff this, earning just $4.9 million and proving how frontloaded and limited in appeal those tween concert movies are. Next up it's the new action-comedy The Family, with Robert DeNiro and Michelle Pfeiffer versus Insidious 2, the horror sequel (which I'm gonna guess right now will be the winner in that battle).
