Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Arthur’s Sword stuck in stone
LOS ANGELES — King Arthur: Legend of the Sword failed to pull off an Excaliburlike miracle to top Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, becoming the summer season’s first big flop.
In its debut, the Warner Bros. live-action take came in third, with just $15.4 million. Falling well below analyst expectations of $25 million, this is an even rougher start than projected for a movie with a $175 million price tag.
King Arthur has suffered from a mix of negative reviews, with it sitting at 27 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Moviegoers (59 percent male; 56 percent under age 35) gave it a B-plus CinemaScore.
Guardians remains atop the box office for the second weekend in a row. The James Gunn-written and directed picture, which opened higher than its predecessor by an impressive 55 percent, brought in an additional $65.3 million in U.S. and Canadian theaters. Beating analyst expectations of $58 million, this is only a 57 percent drop from its debut last week, a feat, as most Marvel sequels tend to decline about 60 percent.
Of the weekend’s new releases, 20th Century Fox’s Snatched performed the best, taking in $19.5 million. It met analyst projections of $15 million to $20 million and landed in second place.
The film, starring Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn as a traveling daughter and mother on an exotic vacation that goes horribly wrong, is the first original raunchy comedy of the summer season. As this is a genre that’s often box-office gold, a la last year’s Bad Moms and 2014’s
Neighbors, Snatched’s performance is a decent start for the $42 million movie.
Pulling up the top five rear were Universal’s The Fate of the Furious and Disney’s
Beauty and the Beast. The two brought in $5.4 million and $4.8 million, respectively, for domestic grosses to date of $215 million and $494 million.
On the limited-release front, BH Tilt’s Lowriders, in fewer than 300 theaters, brought in $2.4 million, good enough for a top 10 spot at No. 8. and better than its projections of $750,000 to $1.2 million.
Starring Demian Bichir and Eva Longoria, the comingof-age drama set against East Los Angeles’ lowrider culture follows a young street artist (Gabriel Chavarria, East Los High) straddling life between his father (Bichir), who’s all about lowriders, his ex-felon brother (Theo Rossi of Sons of Anarchy), who hates their dad, and his need for self-expression. Longoria plays the wife of Bichir’s character, the stepmother to the sons.
Dubbed the first major feature inspired by the people and traditions of the lowrider culture and produced in part by Imagine Entertainment and Telemundo Films, Lowriders targeted high-performing Hispanic markets, with the audience being 53 percent male and 61 percent ages 18 to 34.
Today, joining the multiplexes will be Fox’s Alien: Covenant and Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul and Warner Bros.’ young adult adaptation Everything, Everything.