Straight Outta Compton will top the box office for a third consecutive week with about $15 million.
Three new films bow this weekend, but none is a major threat:
The political thriller No Escape
The faith-based drama War Room
Te disc jockey romance We Are Your Friends
We Are Your Friends aims at younger women, given the appeal of star Zac Efron and electronic music backdrop.
Inevitable comparisons will be made to Pump Up the Iron
This film should pull in roughly $9 million from 2,333 locations, which would be a solid result given as Warner spent only $2 million to acquire it out of the American Film Market.
The Weinstein Company’s No Escape got a jump start on the weekend, debuting in 3,007 theaters on Wednesday, before expanding to 3,350 venues on Friday. The picture will likely bring in $12 million over its first five days of release and $9 million for the weekend. It’s also an acquisition.
TWC picked up No Escape from Bold Films for roughly $5 million, so even a modest debut could still make profits. The picture centers on an American engineer (Owen Wilson) who finds himself in a head-on collision with a political coup in a Southeast Asian nation. John Erick Dowdle, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Drew, directs the film.
Advertising for the film has focused on a key scene that finds Wilson hurling his daughter from great heights. At a screening on Monday, he nodded to the ubiquity of the sequence by joking that instead of “No Escape,” the film should be entitled “throwing a child from roof to roof.”
War Room
The film is currently selling the most tickets of any of the new films, according to Fandango. Its Christian content could be resonating with church groups, who may be buying tickets in bulk, potentially skewing numbers. The film centers on a couple that find the solution to their crumbling marriage in prayer. It debuts across 1,100 locations and should take in between $4 million to $5 million, though that number could increase if Christian moviegoers embrace the picture in the way they did “God’s Not Dead” and “Heaven Is for Real.” Sony Pictures Entertainment’s TriStar Pictures label is distributing the film.
“No studio likes to open things at this time of year,” Phil Contrino, vice president and chief analyst at BoxOffice.com, told Variety. “People are on vacation or they’re doing things that don’t involve sitting inside a theater.”
