Bad Boys for Life leads, without much resistance
With little competition for its two seasoned stars, Columbia’s action-comedy sequel Bad Boys for Life easily led movie ticket sales last weekend, maintaining its top spot at the domestic box office for its second weekend in theaters.
Bad Boys for Life, which stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, sold an estimated $34 million in domestic tickets Friday through Sunday. It brought in an additional $42 million overseas last weekend, according to the studio.
The movie brings back buddy-cop characters Smith and Lawrence originated in the 1995 blockbuster Bad Boys. Audiences appear happy with their return: In CinemaScore exit polls, they gave Bad Boys for Life an A grade. Last weekend provided further proof that Smith and Lawrence can still put plenty of ticket buyers in seats, even after 17 years of radio silence since the sequel Bad Boys II.
Not that there was much to stop them.
The weekend’s top new release was Guy Ritchie’s star-studded gangster film The Gentlemen. The STX Entertainment release came in on the high side of expectations with $11 million in ticket sales. The film was a return to the criminal underworld for Ritchie (Aladdin, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels). Reviews were fairly strong for The Gentlemen (72% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) even though some critics saw traces of racism in the film’s depictions.
The Gentlemen has an ensemble of stars — Matthew McConaughey, Colin Farrell, Michelle Dockery, Henry Golding and Hugh Grant — with a plot centering on a drug kingpin (McConaughey) eyeing retirement, and a collection of reprobates who want to take his place.
The Gentlemen landed in fourth place overall, behind a pair of holdovers.
Second place went to Sam Mendes’ 1917, which added theaters in its fifth week of release to keep pace with its Academy Awards momentum. The film grossed $15.8 million over the weekend to bring its North American total to $103.9 million. Worldwide, it has taken in $200.5 million.
It was a good weekend for 1917. On Saturday night, Mendes took the top prize at the Directors Guild Awards, solidifying the World War I tale as the clear Oscar frontrunner and Mendes as the favorite for best director. The film earlier triumphed at the highly predictive Producers Guild Awards. And its venerated cinematographer, Roger Deakins, also won the American Society of Cinematographers award on Saturday.
Universal’s Dolittle, an adventure movie that casts Robert Downey Jr. as the titular, fictional veterinarian, landed in third: It sold about $12.5 million in domestic tickets according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. That’s a paltry amount for a movie that cost at least $200 million to make and market — and was in only its second weekend in domestic theaters.
The Turning, a horror movie also distributed by Universal, was released in domestic theaters last weekend but apparently failed to crack the top five. It managed just $7.3 million in estimated ticket sales, which would put it in sixth place, behind Columbia’s Jumanji: The Next Level.
That movie, which was in its seventh weekend in theaters, sold an estimated $7.9 million in tickets Friday through Sunday.
The outlook for the rest of the year remains downbeat. There are fewer surefire hits slated for release in 2020, and any sober assessment suggests box-office revenue is “going to be down a lot,” said Cowen & Co.’s Doug Creutz. Walt Disney Co., in particular, has fewer blockbusters in the offing. Creutz expects the studio’s sales to decline by about 30% from last year. “It might be more than that,” he said.