Box Office Weekend: Guardians Retake Lead and Summer Honors

It may have not been the most likely contender for the title, but Guardians of the Galaxy did the near impossible and dethroned Transformers: Age of Extinction for highest earning domestic release of the summer box office. With an estimated $17.6 million this weekend, it pulled ahead of both the Michael Bay directed robot smash fest as well as the Bay-produced mutant fest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. While already a minor success, with an estimated $16.8 million it trails Guardians of the Galaxy by over $100 million in gross earnings, though both films remain the highest earning films of the top ten. None of the remaining movies have broken the $100 million line, but that does not mean they have not been successes on their own terms.

If I Stay, the latest young adult novel-turned-movie, debuted in third with an estimated $16.4 million, not enough to turn many heads but enough to make back its $11 million costs and then some. Let’s Be Cops has defied critical expectations and its estimated $11 million has given it a comfortable $45.2 million in total ticket sales. So, too, has the Helen Mirren charm worked to give ninth-place finisher The Hundred-Foot Journey (estimated $5.6 million) some sizable padding to work with.

However, not much else can be considered much of a success. In sixth place, The Giver is the closest, an estimated $6.7 million nearly enough to breaking even on its $25 million costs, but When the Game Stands Tall’s estimated $9 million leaves it high and dry against $15 million; The Expendables 3 brings in an estimated $6.6 million on a suspiciously unreported budget; Frank Miller’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For gets a rough start with an estimated $6.5 million, and Into the Storm (estimated $3.8 million) managed to fall apart, landing in tenth and failing to make back $50 million in three weeks at the box office.

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Seth Paul

When not failing to write novels and screenplays, box-office guru Seth writes humorous comedy tracks for films under the name "The One Man Band" that can be found at Rifftrax.com. Although, he has recently succeeded in writing the novella "Jack Alan and the Case of the Not-Exactly Rocket Scientists," available as an eBook on Amazon. He is also the English voice of Zak in "Zak McKracken: Between Time and Space."

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