Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham weren’t enough to save “Expendables” from a box office failure. The fourth installment suffered the worst opening weekend in the action saga, while “The Nun 2” took first place for the third week in a row, data company Comscore reported on Sunday.
The Lionsgate and Millennium film, also known as “Expendables 4,” grossed an average of $8.3 million for a big-budget production. It stars some famous names, including Stallone, Statham, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Megan Fox, and Dolph Lundgren. It’s been almost a decade since the franchise started. The first film was released for 15.8 million dollars and ended up grossing 214 million worldwide.
But times are definitely changing, as the film placed second behind “The Nun 2,” a horror film that earned $8.4 million over the weekend. This is a strong start for the Warner Bros. project, which is derived from the profitable “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 get scared by the movies for an hour and a half or two; that’s the price of admission.”
“Barbie,” the top-grossing movie of 2023, continues to carry some momentum from summer to monsoon. 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 a 10-week run.
Overall, it was another slow weekend for box office numbers, as many Hollywood projects remained on hold due to strikes by actors’ and writers’ unions.
This weekend, theaters saw the lowest number since December 9, 2022, according to Dergarabedian. It’s also the first time since the weekend of February 10, 2023, that no film has grossed more than $10 million.
But Dergarabedian said a “weird October” could come 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 the multiplexes,” he said. “They are the natural ups and downs of the box office.”
Below are the estimated numbers for ticket sales from Friday through Sunday at theaters in the United States and Canada, according to Comscore. The final numbers will be published on Monday.
1. “The Nun II”, $8.4 million
2. “Expendables,”, 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
