‘Lego’ leaves the competition far behind

Everything is indeed awesome for the makers of The Lego Movie, whose popular animated flick earned the top spot at the domestic box office for the third consecutive weekend. Easing just 37 percent, Lego grossed $31.5 million. Its overall cume now stands at $183.2 million. Unsurprisingly, Warner Bros. has already greenlit a sequel. The Lego Movie 2 is slated to hit theatres on Memorial Day 2017.

Don’t count on a follow-up to the McG-directed 3 Days to Kill, however. The actioner starring Kevin Costner took second place with an unremarkable $12.3 million. The film’s weekend gross is a little less than that which The Family, the last collaboration between writer-producer Luc Besson and Relativity Media, earned over its opening weekend this past September. Kill’s audience was an older crowd, 80 percent over the age of 25, who collectively awarded the film a B CinemaScore grade. Expectations for the movie’s total haul are pretty low: Pundits are predicting the film will earn around $30 million overall.

However, with a budget of only $28 million, at least 3 Days to Kill isn’t as large – or should we say as volcanic? – a bomb as Pompeii. It’s true, most pundits weren’t expecting much from the poorly reviewed disaster film, but Pompeii managed to underperform nonetheless.  The movie earned $10 million this weekend, a dismal debut considering its production costs topped $100 million. Pompeii’s opening weekend figure was less than half of fellow big-budget movie and box-office failure Poseidon’s debut haul, although it is slightly better than those openings enjoyed by The Legend of Hercules ($8.9 million) and I, Frankenstein ($8.6 million), both of which films were also heavily CGI-dependent. Maybe sensory overload fatigue has finally begun to set in?

Clocking in at No. 4, RoboCop earned $9.4 million, which represents a drop of 57 percent from last weekend. So far, the reboot has grossed $43.6 million.

It may not be the critics’ cup of tea, but George Clooney’s The Monuments Men continues to satisfy a sizable portion of the movie-going public. The WWII caper took in another $8.1 million this weekend, earning it the No. 5 spot and bumping its overall cume to $58 million.

The weekend after Valentine’s Day was a tough one for those releases that opened wide on the national chocolate-and-flowers holiday. About Last Night fared the best, though it still suffered a drop of 71 percent to gross $7.4 million – its total earnings currently stand at $38.2 million. Endless Love took a hit of 68 percent and has now grossed $20.1 million. Poor, misguided Winter’s Tale dipped 71 percent; its total clocks in at a little over $11 million.

Finally, the weekend’s specialty division saw a solid limited opening for Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises. The nominee for Best Animated Feature took in $306,000 from 21 locations. It should continue to chart a successful course once it expands to 450 theatres this coming weekend.

'Insidious: Chapter 2' posts best horror opening in September

Earning four times the opening of the original, Insidious: Chapter 2 got off to a great start with $41 million, the best debut ever for a horror movie in September. It's also just $1 million off the best September opening, which was set last year by Hotel Transylvania, a rare animated offering during what's usually a quieter month. Adding to the list of records, the opening makes director James Wan only the second person ever (to the Matrix series' Wachowskis) to open two movies that high in the same year. Just a couple of months ago, Wan's The Conjuring also started off with over $40 million in a weekend. But what did audiences think? Viewers gave it a "B+" in exit polls, which is pretty good for a horror movie, which often receive poor grades. Insidious: Chapter 2 also benefited from topicality: Half the weekend take came from Friday the 13th. Based on the first three days, I think it's also safe to guess that there will be an Insidious: Chapter 3 headed to theatres sometime next year.

The spy action-comedy The Family had a stronger debut than expected, opening to $14.5 million, director Luc Besson's second-best opening weekend. Older audiences in particular turned out to see Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer as mobsters in witness protection: 83% of audiences clocked in over the age of 25.

In four weeks of release, The Butler has limited its decline to roughly a third a week. This week, it dipped another 33% to $5.5 million, which pushed it over the $100 million mark. For the Weinstein Co., this is a big milestone, only the fifth time the distributor has gone into nine-figure territory. Another movie that's been holding particularly well has been We're the Millers. The comedy has earned $131 million to date. This week it finished right behind The Butler, with $5.4 million and a 30% decrease from the previous week.

On Wednesday, Nicole Holofcener's romantic comedy Enough Said, featuring a final performance from the late James Gandolfini, will begin its release. On Friday, action thriller Prisoners will go against a smaller wide release of the b-boy dance film Battle of the Year, a 3D re-release of The Wizard of Oz, and a limited opening of Rush.

'Insidious: Chapter 2' creeps into the fall lineup

A little bit of a fall chill is in the air, and there's no better way to get in a cozy mood than with a spine-tingling movie like Insidious: Chapter 2 (3,049 theatres), which comes from prolific horror director James Wan. The Saw helmer is coming off his surprise hit this summer, The Conjuring, which was also advertised as "from the director of Insidious." Our critic Maitland McDonagh worries that similarity in marketing campaigns could end up hurting the sequel. The

content itself isn't as fresh as the original. The focus on exploring the original film's backstory makes it "more than a little dull and [verging] on incoherence." Still, the recognizable name could make this movie have one of the best horror openings in September. In 2005, The Exorcism of Emily Rose opened to $30 million during the same month, so a figure at or above $30 million would be excellent. That number would also be nearly three times the opening of the original, which debuted to $13 million and slow-burned for weeks afterward.

Even weeks ago, it was fairly clear that The Family (3,091 theatres) wasn't going to do so well. Now, forecasters have zoned in on its likely opening figure: somewhere around $10 million. The Luc Besson-directed movie about a family of American gangsters who hide out in France has the right ingredients, but they don't add up. "Despite a dream cast [which includes Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Tommy Lee Jones],  The Family is an only intermittently
funny gangster comedy," FJI's Daniel Eagan laments.

The specialty slate this weekend is slight, but IFC Films is using the slot to release Blue Caprice, a festival pickup about the Beltway sniper. Comparing the story to other true-life tales like Fruitvale Station and Elephant (a stylistic cousin), critic Ethan Alter feels the movie succeeds in creating emotion, but fails in a cerebral sense. The drama "comes armed with answers, but misses the chance to pose bigger questions."

On Monday, we'll see if Insidious: Chapter 2 is able to break any September records, and if The Family is able to rally past its so-so opening projection.