Weekend Box Office Report: August 22-24 2014

By Kip Mooney • On • In News News 0

 

BOX OFFICE REPORT August 22-24, 2014(estimates from BoxOfficeMojo.com)

TOP 51. Guardians of the Galaxy ($17.6 million)2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ($16.8 million)3. If I Stay ($16.3 million)4. Let's Be Cops ($11.0 million)5. When the Game Stands Tall  ($9.0 million)

They're back! The ragtag Guardians of the Galaxy returned to the top spot, taking an estimated $17.6 million. That makes it the first movie to return to the top spot this year, and makes it the biggest movie of the summer. It will be the biggest movie of 2014 by next week, passing The LEGO Movie and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Pretty impressive for a comic book few people had heard of. 

The Turtles dropped to No. 2 in their second week, but they're doing well enough to make the Top 15, and will end up just outside the Top 10. It's also the biggest movie in the franchise, not adjusted for inflation of course.

If I Stay did the best of the new movies, which proves I can be wildly wrong about these things from time to time. The young adult romance earned $16.3 million, already earning back its meager budget. The tears of all those teenage girls are being wiped up by the studio's box office dollars.

Let's Be Cops is on a surprisingly strong trajectory, already out-earning most of the other non-blockbuster releases. It's beat out the likes of The Giver, The Expendables 3, Into the Storm and Get On Up. The raunchy comedy still did better than the family-friendly football picture When the Game Stands Tall. It made only $9 million, not quite on the level of Remember the Titans, Gridiron Gang or even "” yikes "” Leatherheads.

Outside the top 5: - This Weekend's Indie Champ: Love is Strange, the gay romantic comedy starring Alfred Molina and John Lithgow. It averaged $25,400 on each of its five screens. 

- Sin City: A Dame to Kill For couldn't even pull itself out of the muck. It earned only $6.4 million, all the way down in eighth place. That's a long way off from the original's No. 1 debut back in 2005. That weekend it earned $29.1 million. This sequel won't even make half that.

- Not to mix metaphors, but here's a David and Goliath tale for you: The Purge: Anarchy ($70.7 million) has made more than Hercules ($69.9 million), despite costing a tenth as much.

Next week: Pierce Brosnan is back as an assassin being hunted by the young man he trained in The November Man. It always seems like there's a European thriller that gets dropped on us around Labor Day that no one is very interested in seeing (e.g. The Debt, Closed Circuit). So I'll just go ahead and call a repeat for Guardians of the Galaxy. There's also the freaky horror flick As Above, So Below. But horror's had such an underwhelming year that I don't feel confident saying it will take No. 1.

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About Kip Mooney

Kip Mooney
Like many film critics born during and after the 1980s, my hero is Roger Ebert. The man was already the best critic in the nation when he won the Pulitzer in 1975, but his indomitable spirit during and after his recent battle with cancer keeps me coming back to read not only his reviews but his insightful commentary on the everyday. But enough about a guy you know a lot about. I knew I was going to be a film critic—some would say a snob—in middle school, when I had to voraciously defend my position that The Royal Tenenbaums was only a million times better than Adam Sandler’s remake of Mr. Deeds. From then on, I would seek out Wes Anderson’s films and avoid Sandler’s like the plague. Still, I like to think of myself as a populist, and I’ll be just as likely to see the next superhero movie as the next Sundance sensation. The thing I most deplore in a movie is laziness. I’d much rather see movies with big ambitions try and fail than movies with no ambitions succeed at simply existing. I’m also a big advocate of fun-bad movies like The Room and most of Nicolas Cage’s work. In the past, I’ve written for The Dallas Morning News and the North Texas Daily, which I edited for a semester. I also contributed to Dallas-based Pegasus News, which in the circle of life, is now part of The Dallas Morning News, where I got my big break in 2007. Eventually, I’d love to write and talk about film full-time, but until that’s a viable career option, I work as an auditor for Wells Fargo. I hope to one day meet my hero, go to the Toronto International Film Festival, and compete on Jeopardy. Until then, I’m excited to share my love of film with you.

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