“Hobbs & Shaw” Repeats, Besting All Five Newcomers

By Kip Mooney • On • In Featured, Weekend Box Office Report Featured, Weekend Box Office Report Comments Off on “Hobbs & Shaw” Repeats, Besting All Five Newcomers

BOX OFFICE REPORT

August 9-11, 2019

(estimates from BoxOfficeMojo.com)

TOP 5

Hobbs & Shaw $25.4 million
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark  $20.8 million
The Lion King  $20 million
Dora and the Lost City of Gold  $17 million
Once upon a Time in Hollywood  $11.6 million

Hobbs & Shaw continued to crack wise and kick ass at the box office. The Fast & Furious spin-off beat back all its challengers to remain No. 1, taking in an estimated $25.4 million. The film has now crossed $100 million, but it's not in the same orbit as the last few films in the franchise. It will take a nitrous boost to get this over $200 million. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark performed the best of the five wide releases, again proving horror can beat just about anything. It's earned $20.8 million to date, and while its budget wasn't reported, it can't have cost much more than that.

The Lion King slipped to third but also earned $20 million. Whether you want to call it animation or live-action, it's earned an obscene amount of money. It's already crossed the $1 billion mark, and is the second-biggest movie of 2019 both domestically and internationally. It's got about $30 million to go to top Beauty and the Beast among Disney's remakes, which shouldn't take very long.

Dora and the Lost City of Gold probably came a few years too late to hit on the Dora the Explorer craze, but solid reviews and a family-driven audience led to a decent $17 million opening. It will need to hold on strong as kids start going back to school, since it's $50 million budget was a smart gamble, but one that will still need to pay off. Once upon a Time in Hollywood fell to fifth place, becoming Quentin Tarantino's fourth movie to cross $100 million, and only the second original movie of 2019 to do so. Baby, baby, baby, we're out of time, indeed.

Outside the top 5:

  • This Weekend's Indie Champ: The Peanut Butter Falcon, a buddy road movie with Shia LaBeouf and Zack Gottsagen – a disabled actor actually playing a disabled character – averaged $12,073 on its 17 screens. It adds some next weekend before going wide on August 23.
  • The Art of Racing in the Rain proves audiences might be done with sad movies about dogs, as it managed just $8.1 million. But that was still better than The Kitchen. The disappointing crime saga starring Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss earned just $5.5 million, one of the worst debuts of 2019.
  • But even that was better than Brian Banks, the real-life saga of a promising football player and his journey to reclaim his innocence after being falsely accused. The drama managed a meager $2.1 million. It was bested by the fifth week of The Farewell and a new documentary on K-pop superstars BTS.

Next week: Five more wide releases vie for the top spot. The Angry Birds Movie 2 gets a head start on Tuesday, and I think that will be plenty to beat shark movie 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, raunchy tween comedy Good Boys and the Cate Blanchett dramedy Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, which I think will have one of the year's worst debuts. Then there's Blinded by the Light, the crowd-pleasing drama about a Pakistani British teen who discovers the music of Bruce Springsteen. Warner Bros. paid a lot of money for this out of Sundance, hoping it can be a sleeper hit, but releasing it wide could backfire.

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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.