Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham weren’t enough to save “Expend4bles” from box office failure. The fourth installment suffered the action saga’s worst opening weekend, while “The Nun 2” took first place for the third week in a row, data firm Comscore reported yesterday.
The Lionsgate and Millennium film, also known as “Expendables 4,” grossed a mediocre $8.3 million for a big-budget production. It stars several well-known names, including Stallone, Statham, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Megan Fox and Dolph Lundgren. It’s been almost a decade since the franchise debuted. The first film opened with $15.8 million and ended up grossing $214 million worldwide.
But times have certainly changed, as the film came in second place behind The Nun 2, a horror film that grossed $8.4 million this weekend. It was a solid start for the Warner Bros. project, which grew out of the lucrative “Conjuring” franchise.
“It’s a star-studded franchise, but horror is a different situation,” said Paul Dergarabedian, media analyst at Comscore. “It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re scared a few times in an hour and a half or two hours in a movie theater, it’s worth the price of admission.”
“Barbie,” the highest-grossing film of 2023, continues to maintain some momentum from the summer through the fall season. Greta Gerwig’s box office hit cracked the top five with $3.2 million this week and a total of more than $630 million in North America after its 10-week run.
Overall, it was another weak weekend for box office returns, with many Hollywood projects on hold due to strikes by actors and writers unions.
According to Dergarabedian, theaters this weekend had their lowest grosses since December 9, 2022. It was also the first time since the weekend of February 10, 2023 that no film grossed more than $10 million.
But Dergarabedian said a “spectacular October” could be in store with the highly anticipated “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” “The Exorcist: Believer” and “Saw X.”
“Things will change next week or the week after when Taylor Swift hits multiplexes,” he said. “They are the natural ebb and flow of the box office.”
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Below are estimated numbers for Friday-Sunday ticket sales at theaters in the U.S. and Canada, according to Comscore. The final figures will be published today.
1. “The Nun II,” $8.4 million
2. “Expend4bles,” 8.3 million
3. “A Haunting in Venice,” 6.3 million
4. “The Equalizer 3,” 4.7 million
5. “Barbie,” 3.2 million
6. “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3,” 3 million
7. “It Lives Inside,” 2.6 million
8. “Dumb Money,” 2.5 million
9. “Blue Beetle,” 1.8 million
10. “Oppenheimer,” 1.6 million