Hobbs And Shaw Box Office: Scary Stories Is Good Competition, But Fast And Furious Holds The Top Spot

This past weekend was a major one for new releases. After seeing only six new wide releases hit theaters in the entire month of July, Hollywood opened the floodgates on Friday an unleashed a whole lot of new stuff in thousands of theaters across the country. Of the new movies, it was Andre Ovredal’s Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark that performed the best, but while it proved good competition, it wasn’t enough to take David Leitch’s Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw out of the top spot.

Check out the breakdown of the full Top 10 below, and join me after for analysis!

We’ve seen a number of unfortunate second weekends so far in summer 2019, so while the performance by Hobbs & Shaw the past three days wasn’t exactly “impressive,” it can still be called solid over all. Those following the week-to-week will remember that the blockbuster raked in $60 million in its opening, and now it has managed to cross into nine figure territory – which is something that every Fast & Furious release has done domestically, with the exception of Justin Lin’s The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, which, despite being awesome, made only $62.5 million here in North America back in 2006.

As expected, though, it’s really the foreign numbers that cause the total gross for the film to really balloon. Nice as $108.5 million may be after two weeks, countries outside of the continent have contributed more than double that amount. So far the worldwide total sits at $332.6 million, which ranks it as the sixth most successful release in the franchise. It should wind up easily taking over the five spot – currently occupied by Justin Lin’s Fast and Furious from 2004 – but that may be the highest it climbs, as the next rung on the ladder is Lin’s Fast Five, which hauled in $626.1 million before it was done in 2011.

The movie should continue to perform well as we get deeper into the rest of August, and beating out Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark definitely looks good on paper. Its reign may wind up ending next week thanks to the release of Sony Pictures Animation’s The Angry Birds Movie 2, but it will continue drawing audiences over the next few weeks just by the nature of being the last big action movie of the season (which is a good thing considering it still needs to fully justify its reported $200 million budget).

Speaking of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark and budgets, the new horror movie from writer/producer Guillermo del Toro is well on its way to being a nice and profitable release considering that it reportedly cost only about $28 million to make. The movie wasn’t expected to be a huge hit, with estimates early in the week suggesting a haul closer to $15 million and a third or fourth place opening weekend ranking, but the horror feature managed to defy expectations with its $20.8 million haul and second place finish. It may not wind up staying in the Top Five for very long, but it will likely be seen as a solid venture in retrospect that could potentially serve as the launching pad for a new series.

Part of the reason why Speaking of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark was expected to finish further down on the Top 10 is because while it managed to do better than prognosticator suggestion, the same cannot be said for James Bobin’s Dora And The Lost City of Gold. Under normal circumstances you’d think that this movie would be a huge hit, given that it is an adaptation of a massively popular kids show and has received surprisingly positive reviews, but apparently it just didn’t click with audiences, and so it had to settle for fourth place behind Jon Favreau’s The Lion King (which will be nearing a $1.4 billion total before too long).

Of the five new wide releases this past weekend, those two were the real surprises, as the other three performed just about as well as expected (which is to say not well at all). Neither Simon Curtis’ The Art Of Racing In The Rain nor Andrea Berloff’s The Kitchen inspired much of a response from critics, and the end result is that both of them brought in less than $10 million despite each being out in more than 2,700 theaters. At the very least, though, they look better than Tom Shadyac’s Brian Banks, which played in on 1,240 screens nationwide and failed to crack the Top 10 – instead being forced to settle for a $2.1 million opening and 12th place.

Lastly I will shine the spotlight on Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, which continues to perform well as it slipped two spots in the rankings. The third straight weekend of eight digit earnings has resulted in the period drama becoming the fourth release from the writer/director to earn more than $100 million here in North America. It’s an esteemed group of titles that also includes 2012’s Django Unchained, 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, and 1994’s Pulp Fiction. By the time it’s done in theaters, it very well could wind up being the second biggest Tarantino movie, which would actually be pretty amazing in the current box office climate. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens to it as it fights for recognition against all of the titles that are set to hit the big screen between now and the end of the month.

Much like this past weekend, Hollywood will once again be flooding theaters with a wide array of new releases during the next Friday-to-Sunday, including the aforementioned The Angry Birds Movie 2, the shark adventure 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, the musical drama Blinded By The Light, the R-rated comedy Good Boys, and the anticipated adaptation Where’d You Go, Bernadette? Be sure to come back to CinemaBlend this time next week to see how they affect the Top 10.