Weekend Box Office: ‘Hotel Transylvania 3’ Topples ‘Skyscraper’
Dwayne Johnson got a rare bit of bad box-office news this weekend, as his latest blockbuster, Skyscraper, fizzled out. It opened in third place on the box office chart. Instead, the animated sequel Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation won the weekend with an estimated $44.1 million in domestic grosses. Here’s the full chart:
Film | Weekend | Per Screen | Total | |
1 | Hotel Transylvania 3 | $44,100,000 | $10,335 | $45,376,000 |
2 | Ant-Man and the Wasp | $28,840,000 (-62%) | $6,857 | $132,825,225 |
3 | Skyscraper | $25,485,000 | $6,738 | $25,485,000 |
4 | Incredibles 2 | $16,220,000 (-42%) | $4,378 | $535,818,492 |
5 | Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom | $15,515,000 (-45%) | $4,199 | $363,297,215 |
6 | The First Purge | $9,130,000 (-47%) | $3,005 | $49,509,970 |
7 | Sorry to Bother You | $4,258,000 (+485%) | $5,289 | $5,322,952 |
8 | Sicario: Day of the Soldado | $3,850,000 (-49%) | $1,919 | $43,200,345 |
9 | Uncle Drew | $3,225,000 (-51%) | $1,895 | $36,692,040 |
10 | Ocean’s 8 | $2,910,000 (-42%) | $1,799 | $132,255,936 |
Hotel Transylvania 3’s $44.1 million opening was about on par for the series; the first film opened with $42.4 million in 2012 and the first sequel made $48.4 million in 2015. CinemaScore voters gave the film an A-, the exact same grade the previous two movies got. So this is a very healthy, very crowd-pleasing franchise and Summer Vacation should make in the same $150-$175 million domestic range as its predecessors.
Speaking of sequels and their predecessors, Ant-Man and the Wasp had a bigger percentage drop in its second weekend in theaters (62 percent) than the first Ant-Man (56 percent) did in 2015. It still made over $28 million from Friday to Saturday, bringing its ten-day domestic total to $132.8 million. (Ant-Man’s ten-day domestic total: $106.2 million.) In the next day or so, Ant-Man and the Wasp will pass The Incredible Hulk to become the second-lowest grossing Marvel Cinematic Universe film ever in the U.S. (Sorry Edward Norton, you’re still the pits.) Will Ant-Man 2 cross $200 million domestic? Will it pass Thor: The Dark World and its $206.3 million? It’s possible, but not guaranteed.
If anything proves there are no guarantees in movies, it’s Skyscraper. After a string of huge hits, it’s the first disappointment from Dwayne Johnson in a while; the last action movie he starred in with a less-than-$30-million opening was Hercules back in 2014 (and that movie opened bigger than Skyscraper too.) Perhaps audiences felt this Die Hard knockoff looked a little too close to the original Die Hard. Maybe with two big films in the last nine months (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Rampage) Johnson had oversaturated the market. Either way, Skyscraper is the rare Rock flop.
The top five was rounded out by Incredibles 2, which has now made $535 million in the U.S. alone, and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which has grossed $363.2 million, pushing it past the original Jurassic Park to become the second-biggest film in franchise history. (At least it’s second-biggest before you adjust for inflation. After you adjust for inflation Fallen Kingdom is the second-lowest grosser in the franchise. Inflation is nuts.) On a per-screen basis, the big hit of the weekend was Eighth Grade, which made $252,284 in just four theaters around the country, for an average of $63,071.
Gallery - The Biggest Second Weekends in Box-Office History: