Box Office Week: The Hitman's Bodyguard scores solid #1 with $21.6M while Logan Lucky flops at #3 with $8M. This marked the second worst box office weekend of the year. Also worldwide Wonder Woman passes $800M, Transformers: The Last Knight passes $600M, and Cars 3 finally passes $300M.

Rank	Title	Domestic Gross (Weekend)	Worldwide Gross (Cume)	Week #
1	The Hitman's Bodyguard	$21,600,000	$21,600,000	1
2	Annabelle: Creation	$15,500,000	$160,744,221	2
3	Logan Lucky	$8,050,182	$8,050,182	1
4	Dunkirk	$6,700,000	$392,708,079	5
5	The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature	$5,113,278	$17,696,923	2

Notable Box Office Stories:

• It was a pretty weak weekend overall, the second worst weekend of the year, but The Hitman's Bodyguard was one of the few to surpass it's modest expectations scoring a solid $21.6M at #1. The R-rated comedy wasn't exactly banking on it's smart screenplay (the film received mixed reviews at best) as much as the likability of its two leads Ryan Reynolds and Sam Jackson. While Reynolds has had great success with Deadpool last year, for the past five years he's really struggled as a lead of films like Life and RIPD, where he usually barely managed to crack $20M or even $10M. Jackson's recent run has been much better but he's mostly focused on being a supporting character in major franchises like Avengers and Kong: Skull Island and hasn't really been a lead outside of a Quentin Tarantino film in years. As such a late August, R-rated release wasn't quite the expected blockbuster, but the opening went ahead of the expected low teens and with an okay B+ on Cinemascore the film could hold well enough and may make Jackson and Reynolds a new comedic duo.

• If it's true Stephen Soderbergh decided to "retire" from filmmaking in 2013 because Hollywood doesn't make medium budget films any more than the box office failure of Logan Lucky probably won't help as the film closed to a pretty bad $8M at #3. Interestingly this is actually the best opening every for independent distributor Bleecker Street but it's also their first release in over 3,000 theaters so that's to be expected. Part of the issue here is that this even is an independent feature to begin with. 15 years ago Soderbergh got to make Ocean's 11 for $85M (with most of that money going to the cast) and see it open with the full weight of a studio at $38M. Now to make a film with Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, and Daniel Craig costs him $29M and Soderbergh did all his own advertising including cutting his own trailers and TV spots, opening with fantastic reviews for a total whimper. This isn't to say original films are dead, more that the expectations for them have drastically changed. In the time since Soderbergh's absence from cinema fantastic distributors like A24 as well as producers like Netflix and Amazon have emerged as the new champions of smart unique films but few of them are extremely profitable even with good Oscar campaigns. Logan Lucky is just not the kind of event fair that drives people to the theater any more, instead many will likely dismiss the film as a good VOD rental or something to wait to see on Netflix. It's unclear if this will cause Soderbergh to see his shadow and have 4 more years of "retirement" but it's certainly not the new world of independent film he may have wanted.

• This week saw a bunch of milestones and records for Wonder Woman which has most notably passed $800M worldwide, a major milestone for WB and the second DCEU film to do so. The film also managed to pass the lifetime domestic gross of Spider-man with $404M, making it the highest grossing superhero origin film and the seventh highest grossing superhero film over all, with just $5M to go to possibly become the 5th highest grossing overall. Meanwhile while it failed to excite domestically, Transformers: The Last Knight managed the classic Transformers move of making enough overseas to justify it as the film has now passed $600M worldwide. However don't expect Paramount to throw a major party as the film is still miles away from the previous entry Age of Extinction. As of now TLK has made $115M less domestic and $387M less worldwide than AOE. Now with supposed creative head of the franchise Akiva Goldsman leaving for greener pastures it's not looking good for Paramount which has struggled greatly the last two years. Speaking of struggling, Cars 3 finally has passed $300M worldwide. This isn't exactly a great milestone as every single Pixar film has passed that number and Cars 3 was looking like the only film that wouldn't manage it. The film has been a complete disaster for Pixar, as despite the film getting better reviews than Cars 2, it's the second worst performing Pixar film domestically and the worst performing Pixar film worldwide. Ultimately Good Dinosaur will still exist as the worst Pixar disappointment as Cars 3 still has the success of the first two and their incredible merchandise sales to couch the failure, but it's certain that the theatrical Cars films are over.

Films Reddit Wants to Follow

This is a segment where we keep a weekly tally of currently showing films that aren't in the Top 5 that fellow redditors want updates on. If you'd like me to add a film to this chart, make a comment in this thread.

Title	Domestic Gross (Cume)	Worldwide Gross (Cume)	Budget	Week #
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2	$389,192,395	$862,273,505	$200M	16
Alien: Covenant	$74,236,713	$232,712,755	$97M	13
Wonder Woman	$404,008,376	$800,008,376	$149M	12
Cars 3	$148,790,767	$308,290,767	$175M	10
Baby Driver	$101,708,441	$175,108,441	$34M	8
Spider-man: Homecoming	$314,051,381	$724,851,381	$175M	7

Notable Film Closings

Title	Domestic Gross	Worldwide Gross	Budget
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul	$20,738,724	$38,883,109	$22M

As always /r/boxoffice is a great place to share links and other conversations about box office news.

Also you can see the archive of all Box Office Week posts at /r/moviesboxoffice.

Submitted August 21, 2017 at 10:27PM by mi-16evil http://ift.tt/2v7wY5N