- Box Office
World Box Office August 12 – 18, 2019
Universal’s pre-teen comedy Good Boys performed well above expectations and ended its opening frame with $21 million and in first place in the US and Canada. Good Boys is about a group of three middle school kids coping with bullying and family troubles and, of course, trying to get laid. It borrows much of its tone from 2007’s Superbad, whose writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg also served as producers through their company Point Grey pictures. It also opened in 13 minor markets, and in the UK, making $2.1 million in these for worldwide earnings of $23.1 million.
Angry Birds 2, also opening in the US, started in fourth place on just $10.5 million. The first movie, which opened in 2016, went on to gross $352 million worldwide despite being nearly universally panned by critics. Birds 2‘s reviews have been slightly better, but most of the buzz that brought Angry Birds its success just isn’t part of the market landscape anymore. The cellphone game the story is based on, in which players slingshot exploding birds at green pigs on the other side of their screens, reached the peak of its popularity in the early 2010s. Three years ago the movie’s title and the somehow groundbreaking idea of making a movie out of a mobile app was much fresher than it is today. Birds 1, by comparison, opened to $38 million in the US. Foreign sales weren’t much better. Birds 2 made $19 million in $29 markets including China where it only managed $10 million against a strong crop of local hits. So far Birds 2‘s global cume is at $46.4 million against a budget of $65 million
Also debuting on the domestic box office was Entertainment Studios’ claustrophobic survival horror sequel 47 Meters Down: Uncaged. It made $9 million in the US, finishing in sixth place. Uncaged is a spiritual sequel to 47 Meters Down in that it doesn’t share any of the first film’s cast or storyline, it just repeats the premise. The original was about two female divers trapped in a cage at the bottom of the sea with hungry great white sharks trying to break in. This time, there are three women. Two of them, Corinne Foxx and Sistine Stallone, happen to be former Miss Golden Globe. And instead of being trapped in a shark cage, they’re trapped in a sunken Mayan temple, which is full of sharks. Critical reviews and Audience scores were not that good: it only managed a C+ on Cinemascore.
On the combined chart, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood was the overall leader. It made $61.3 million worldwide and brought its global cume to $180.5 million. It made $8.9 million from its opening in the UK and $6.9 million in its start in France. Once Upon A Time is tracking ahead of Django Unchanged, Tarantino’s highest-grossing film to date, in all of its markets. Mexico, Japan, and Italy are yet to open, with a possible Chinese release on the horizon.
Toy Story 4 for its part finally broke $1 billion, finishing the frame at $1.016 billion worldwide. It is now Disney’s record fifth billion-dollar movie of the year (and five and a half if you count their role in Spider-Man: Far from Home, which incidentally just became Sony’s best-selling picture of all time.)
Next weekend Lionsgate’s third film in the Fallen series with Gerard Butler, Angel Has Fallen, opens in the US.
See the latest world box office estimates: