THE WEEKEND ACTUALS

	Film	Weekend	Opening Weekend	Current Gross
	Suicide Squad	$43.536 million	$133.682 million	$222.640 million
	Sausage Party	$34.263 million	$34.263 million	$34.263 million
	Pete’s Dragon	$21.514 million	$21.514 million	$21.514 million
	Jason Bourne	$13.846 million	$59.215 million	$127.009 million
	Bad Moms	$11.362 million	$23.817 million	$71.374 million

Suicide Squad may have taken spot number one, as was predicted, but it wasn’t the winner of the weekend. Instead, it turned out to be the surprise hit Sausage Party, the R-rated food-based animated comedy from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. It was predicted to make a modest $15-20 million in its opening weekend and ended Sunday evening with $34 million. This number is even more impressive when you realize the film was made for $19 million — Sony and Columbia, not to mention everyone involved with making the film, have got to be feeling pretty good right now. And it certainly has me rethinking aspects like marketing, audience habits, and trying to track things like box office numbers which, in all their predictably, can be wildly unpredictable.

While Sausage Party may not have approached the opening weekend $100 million plus numbers of animated family films, it can definitely play ball with its other genre, that of the R-rated comedy. For all the films Rogen and Goldberg have written together, including Superbad, This Is the End, The Interview, Pineapple Express, and The Green Hornet, this is their best opening weekend yet. It didn’t beat some of the opening numbers for films like The Hangover or Ted, but based on its impressive first outing and the good word of mouth it’s getting (over the weekend, it had the second highest amount of tweets with 135,642), it should be able to keep riding this wave for a solid overall box office by the time its theater run ends. It’s definitely a fantastic entry into the canon of these type of over-the-top R-rated comedies and proves there’s definitely a solid audience for them.

Yet it still wasn’t enough to beat Suicide Squad, but being number one doesn’t always mean much. There was a difference of less than $10 million between Suicide Squad and Sausage Party, which is very telling. And while it might not have dropped the awful 69 percent that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice did, Suicide Squad certainly got close with a 67 percent drop and no theater count change. Worldwide, the film has made $466 million and it’s certainly a profit for Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment on a $175 million budget, but it’s starting to shape up that it won’t reach $1 billion, just as BvS couldn’t, especially when it’s making less each weekend than BvS did so far. Furthermore, it’s already starting to show weakness against competing films and that will only continue as more and more wide releases hit theaters over the next few weeks, such as Kubo and the Two Strings, War Dogs, and Don’t Breathe (Ben-Hur, on the other hand, shouldn’t make much of a difference as it’s expected to have a pretty dismal box office performance).

Another weaker performer at the box office this weekend was Disney’s Pete’s Dragon. Likely due to competition from Suicide Squad and Sausage Party (even though all three films largely target different demographics), as well as people simply being less familiar with the film. It opened a little over $21 million, which is not bad given its $65 million budget, and the fact that it still has several more weeks to make revenue. Still, it won’t be the hit that The Jungle Book turned out to be earlier in the year, but hey, Disney’s got to be glad it’s doing better than The BFG so far. The film from David Lowery is receiving good reviews nearly across the board, so most people are the Mouse House are probably hoping for a sleeper hit.

The last two films were the expected Jason Bourne and Bad Moms, but with higher box office earnings than expected. It was only a 38 percent drop for Bourne and an 18 percent drop for Moms, even as they each fell in theater counts. This will be the last week Bad Moms finds itself in the top five, but in the three weeks it’s been out so far, it hasn’t performed poorly at all. Jason Bourne, on the other hand, while not an outright disappoint in any way, has certainly dropped significantly from its opening in noticeable ways. It probably won’t be able to beat last year’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, which ended with nearly $200 million in domestic numbers. Jason Bourne has so far made $127 million and probably doesn’t have a huge lifespan looking forward.

Taking the last five positions are films that should come as a surprise to no one. The Secret Life of Pets earned $9 million in its sixth week in theaters, which is nothing short of impressive (it’s more than the $7.2 million that Finding Dory made in the same week). While it might not break any big records, it’s by far one of the biggest surprises of the summer and will undoubtedly be one of Illumination Entertainment’s best films so far. Another new movie of the weekend, Florence Foster Jenkins, made $6.6 million, which is a decent showing, but not enough to top Star Trek Beyond’s $6.8 million. Lastly, Nine Lives continues to flounder as it made $3.5 million for the weekend, earning a total of $13.5 million so far, and Lights Out hangs on to its top ten spot with $3.2 million.

(Source: boxoffice.com, boxofficemojo.com. Figures represent numbers at time of writing, and may have changed.)

Anya Crittenton | Associate Editor