‘Dunkirk’ conquers box office for a second weekend
‘Emoji Movie’ overcame severely negative reviews
The Emoji Movie survived negative reviews but couldn’t defeat Dunkirk, which had enough fight left to conquer the box office for a second weekend in a row.
Down only 44% from its first weekend, director Christopher Nolan’s World War II film earned $28.1 million to take first place, according to studio estimates Sunday. Dunkirk has grossed $102.8 million domestically to date.
The Emoji Movie finished second with $25.7 million. The film, featuring the voices of T.J. Miller and Anna Faris as anthropomorphized emojis, got pummeled by critics (only 8% liked it on aggregate review site Rotten Tomatoes), but audiences still turned out.
“It’s great when the critics and audiences are in sync, but in the end it comes down to: Has the film reached the intended audience?” says Adrian Smith, Sony’s president of domestic distribution. “Seeing these results, it clearly has.”
Sony expects the film, which cost an estimated $50 million to make, to play well for the rest of the summer.
The divide between reviews and a film’s success has been a continuing topic this summer, as some films, such as Baywatch, capsized under poor reviews, and others like Emoji seemed immune.
“Kids don’t care about reviews, and there is a severe lack of fam- ily films in the marketplace,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for comScore.
But Emoji fell at the box office throughout the weekend after a strong Friday when it placed No. 1, possibly because of negative word of mouth on social media, Dergarabedian says.
Also holding on quite well is R-rated comedy Girls Trip, which took third place with $20.1 million. Even in its second weekend,
Girls Trip beat out the splashy new Charlize Theron action film
Atomic Blonde, about a British spy on a mission in Berlin during the Cold War, which opened fourth with $18.6 million.
While reviews were generally positive, audiences gave the film a middling B grade on CinemaScore. In fifth place was Spider-Man:
Homecoming, now in its fourth weekend. The new web slinger added $13.5 million, bumping the film’s domestic total to $278.4 million. Homecoming has surpassed both Amazing Spider-Man movies at the North American box office, although it still lags behind behind the Tobey Maguire
Spider-Man films. Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, based on the 1967 riots, launched in a handful of markets, including Detroit, New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta. It earned a strong $365,455 from the limited launch.
Also playing well in limited release is the Al Gore-led climate change documentary An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which took in $130,000 from four locations.
Final figures are expected Monday.