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Box Office: 'Kingsman' Stomps 'LEGO Ninjago' With Golden $15M Friday

This article is more than 6 years old.

Photo by Photo Credit: Giles Keyte - © TM & © 2017 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle isn’t quite a breakout sequel, but it’s doing pretty darn well nonetheless. The 20th Century Fox release is the top movie on Friday (and presumably the weekend) with a solid $15.325 million opening day. That includes $3.4m in Thursday previews and compares quite favorably with the $10m opening day of Kingsman: The Secret Service back in February of 2015. The original Matthew Vaughn-directed comic book actioner earned $36m over the Fri-Sun portion of its $41m Presidents Day debut. We’re looking at a $40m opening for The Golden Circle, which makes this franchise a kind of inverse Star Trek. Star Trek into Darkness needed four days to earn $83m via a Thurs-Sun debut while Star Trek opened with $79m in its Fri-Sun debut weekend.

This isn’t a John Wick Chapter 2 or Quantum of Solace-like blowout, but it still qualifies as a win for the $104 million-budgeted, R-rated actioner. Considering that sequels, even sequels explicitly opening in September, have a coin toss track record of topping their predecessors on opening weekend and beyond, that Kingsman 2 virtually tied the opening weekend of Kingsman 1 counts as a win. For every Insidious Chapter 2 (a $40m opening after a $13m debut for Insidious), there’s a Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials which opened just below the first film’s $32m debut. That this second installment was able to hold its own despite negative reviews and the sheer strength of It is impressive beyond the mere fact that it hit its tracking guestimate.

Kingsman: The Secret Service, based on a Mark Millar comic book, was a “Pygmalion meets 007” action comedy about a lower-class kid who gets molded into an upper-crust secret agent. The Colin Firth/Taron Egerton/Samuel L. Jackson offering was an ultraviolent ode to the late Sean Connery/early Roger Moore James Bond movies that scored $128 million domestic and $414m worldwide. It was a well-liked release that was somewhat slowly discovered over the course of its theatrical (and post-theatrical) life. With goodwill from the first installment, various returning characters (with Vaughn again directing and Vaughn and Jane Goldman again co-writing) and a deluge of new actors (Halle Berry, Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges, Channing Tatum, Pedro Pascal, etc.) joining the fun, this one certainly didn’t rest on its laurels.

The other big newbie of the weekend is Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc.’s The LEGO Ninjago Movie, which unfortunately continues what has been a six-month slump for animation (Despicable Me 3 excepted). The $71 million release earned just $5.8m yesterday, way below the $15m opening Friday for The LEGO Batman Movie this past February and below the $18m opening day of The LEGO Movie in February of 2014. If anything, it’s looking identical to last year’s WB effort, the clever and somewhat underrated Storks, which opened with $21m and still legged it out to $72m. That 3.4x multiplier is almost identical to Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 ($119/$34m) and Hotel Transylvania 2 ($169m/$48m), so WB is hoping for similar results here.

Storks earned $180 million worldwide, but on a $70m budget so the hope is that this one can do better overseas. The spin-off of WB’s LEGO theatrical franchise lacked the novelty of the first LEGO Movie and the Batman bump for The LEGO Batman Movie, and the reviews were (justifiably) pretty lousy. Not to be mean, but this one was about as bad as we all presumed The LEGO Movie would be before that one screened for press. My kids enjoyed it, and there is one extended gag involving a kaiju that is almost worth the price of admission, but this third offering plays like a more expensive (and inferior) version of content that is already available on DVD and VOD. And thus the animation slump continues. Save us, Coco!

The only other wide release is Friend Request. Entertainment Studios struck out with its second turn at-bat, following the blow-out sleeper 47 Meters Down which earned $44 million domestic from an $11m debut this summer and thus put them on the map. Friend Request, which apparently was as bad as we all assumed it would be (and not an unexpected gem like Unfriended) earned just $750,000 on Friday, setting the stage for a $1.9m opening weekend in 2,569 theaters. So it will be another one of those “made less than $10m domestic despite opening wide” releases for the year. And, unless I get a chance to see the film over the next week, I don’t have anything else to say about that one.

The big platformer this weekend was David Gordon Green’s Stronger, which Roadside Attractions put out somewhat surprisingly in 574 theaters this weekend. The Jake Gyllenhaal/Tatiana Maslany drama, concerning the struggles of one Jeff Bauman who lost his legs when bombs went off during the Boston Marathon in April of 2013, has earned palpable Oscar buzz for its leading man and some solid reviews. But it’s not exactly a crowdpleaser, as even the more action-y Patriots Day stumbled back in January. A $520,000 Friday and $1.6 million weekend isn’t a good start for this one, but we’ll see if the award season buzz can keep it alive, but there is going to be a lot of competition for adult-skewing prestige fare over the next month.

Speaking of which, Fox Searchlight debuted Battle of the Sexes, the buzzy and crowd-pleasing look at the 1973 Billy Jean King v Bobby Riggs tennis match that became a statement on gender inequality and the most-watched televised sporting event in history at the time. The Emma Stone/Steve Carell dramedy opened in 21 theaters yesterday in advance of its wide release on the 29th. As such, the Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris-directed release earned $159,000 yesterday for a likely $460k weekend and $21k per-location average. Also debuting, in just four theaters, is the Judi Dench dramedy Victoria and Abdul. The Focus Features release, about the friendship between the Queen of England and young clerk from India, earned $56k yesterday for a likely $157k weekend and $39k per-location average.

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