1. Guardians of the Galaxy- $94M
Remember when Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy was deemed their greatest gamble? Well, Marvel just dropped their shorts all over the nay-sayers with the film's $94M debut, the third highest of the year behind Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Marvel must be poppin' corks everywhere today) and Transformers: Age of Extinction, both of which went on to do pretty well ($700M and $1B respectively) at the box office. It's also the biggest August opening in history, blowing past The Bourne Legacy's $69M. The film got off to an incredible start with an $11M Thursday night, followed by another $11.7M solely in IMAX showings. The space-comedy also played well overseas with another $66M tacked on internationally, so the $170M film should be putting a little more coin in Marvel's coffers. Most important is that audiences and critics dug the film and its cast of irreverent unknown heroes. It currently holds an 'A' Cinemascore and a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the solid buzz is why a sequel was formally announced last week at Comic-Con. Now the question is whether it can maintain this level or if it will suffer a severe second-week drop like Godzilla, which had a similar debut but then slumped across the $200M mark.
2. Lucy- $18.2M/$79.5M
Obviously, Lucy was going to take a tumble since most of the sci-fi flick's audience would be drawn to Guardians of the Galaxy, but at $79M against a $40M budget Luc Besson and Universal are definitely happy.
3. Get On Up- $14M
The James Brown biopic Get On Up got on up to a $14M debut, a respectable if somewhat underwhelming total. It's not bad, but it falls way short of the $27M opening weekend for 42, which starred Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson. Much of the marketing for Get On Up has focused on one thing and that is Boseman's electrifying performance as Brown, which some are calling potentially Oscar-worthy. But they said the same thing about 42 and Boseman was left largely ignored come awards season. We'll just have to wait and see if that changes this time around.
4. Hercules- $10.7M/$52.3M
Not even the box office might of Dwayne Johnson could prevent Hercules from suffering a huge 65% tumble in week number two. The $100M film isn't doing much domestically but is fairing a bit better overseas with $56M, giving it a $108M total haul.
5. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes- $8.7M/$189.3M
6. Planes: Fire & Rescue- $6.4M/$47.5M
7. The Purge: Anarchy- $5.5M/$62.9M
8. Sex Tape- $3.5M/$33.9M
9. And So It Goes- $3.3M/$10.4M
10. A Most Wanted Man- $3.3M/$7M
The John Le Carre adaptation A Most Wanted Man, which also features the last non-Hunger Games performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman, expanded to over 700 theaters and performed well with a $4,500 per site average.
