Monday Box Office Report: Suicide Squad obliterates August box office records

It turns out there’s at least one aspect of Suicide Squad that has definitely lived up to the hype. As predicted last week, the latest DC Comics movie has had a record breaking opening weekend as the David Ayer directed film pulled in $115 million domestically. Add to that the $20.5 million it made from Thursday night preview screenings in the US (itself a new record for August, nearly doubling the previous $11 million high-mark set by Marvel’s Guardian of the Galaxy in 2014, and becoming the 13th biggest Thursday of all time) and that gives it a very impressive four day opening total of $135 million.

That figure absolutely destroys the previous August opening weekend record of $94.3 million, also set by GOTG, and now grants Suicide Squad the honor of becoming one of the top 15 biggest US opening weekends of all time. It’s also the biggest opening of Will Smith’s career, eclipsing I Am Legend’s $77.2 million debut in 2007.

And internationally, things are looking just as good commercially as the film became the biggest August opener ever in the UK, among many other regional accolades. After 3 days of release, its international haul is now standing on a very impressive $132 million, bringing its global opening weekend total to $267 million. That’s nothing to sniff at.

It has to be noted though that despite the film getting savaged by critics, this first weekend success was actually always a foregone conclusion. Suicide Squad had already broken records previously for pre-sales tickets, and these people were always going to see this movie no matter what bad things some folks on the Interwebs said about it. The real test here is going to be what happens in the weeks to come.

After also opening huge, Batman V Superman saw a massive drop in its second and third week totals as bad word of mouth spread, and as a result it fell nearly $200 million short of the $1 billion goal Warner Bros had set for it. Right now Suicide Squad is definitely receiving a relatively warmer reception from fans than critics (sitting on B+ Cinemascore), but it’s still nowhere near the overwhelming positive buzz a movie like GOTG generated and which propelled it to stay on the charts and earn a whole lot of cash for a very long time. And if all the talk of lengthy and costly reshoots are true, Suicide Squad is definitely going to need to hang around for quite some time to make back that money.

And the alarm bells are already starting to go off, as despite the fact that its $135 million debut will see Suicide Squad‘s name get entered into the box office record books, it’s actually about $10-15 million short of what many pundits were predicting. Part of that missed mark can more than likely be attributed to the fact that movie already experienced an alarming 41% drop in revenue between Friday and Saturday. That does not bode well for its box office future.

Oh and I guess there’s another movie that also opened in the US this weekend past. It’s the absurd looking Nine Lives which stars Kevin Spacey – who barely acknowledges that the movie exists – as the voice of a cat though. So yeah, make of that what you will. It bombed terribly by the way. Here’s what happened on the rest of the US Top 10 chart:

• 01. Suicide Squad – $135 million (NE)
• 02. Jason Bourne – $22.1 million (LW: 1)
• 03. Bad Moms – $14.2 million (LW: 3)
• 04. The Secret Life of Pets – $11.5 million (LW: 4)
• 05. Star Trek Beyond –  $10.2 million (LW: 2)
• 06. Nine Lives – $6.5 million (NE)
• 07. Lights Out – $6 million (LW: 5)
• 08. Nerve – $4.9 million (LW: 8)
• 09. Ghostbusters – $4.8 million (LW: 8)
• 10. Ice Age: Collision Course  – $4.3 million (LW:5)

It has to be pointed out that Jason Bourne actually experienced a 60% drop between this week and last. That’s similar to what happened to Star Trek Beyond in its second week as well, and which again happened to the sci-fi threequel this week. Whether that has to do with audiences’ fatigue with both franchises, or whether it’s just a case of the two films being forced to poach from each other as they pick up Suicide Squad‘s table scraps, is up for debate. In other news, Bad Moms continues to make money. With a $52 million total thus far, off just a $20 million budget, it’s become a proper surprise hit.

Also of interest, we finally say goodbye to Finding Dory this week. It’s been on the top 10 charts for 8 weeks now, earning itself a whopping $870 million along the way. It also picked up a string of commercial accolades, like the second biggest opening of all time for an animated film, becoming the fourth highest grossing Pixar film ever, becoming the twelfth highest-grossing animated film of all time, and being the fifth highest grossing film of 2016 thus far. Pretty good for a forgetful fish.

(LW = Last Week, NE = New Entry)

Last Updated: August 8, 2016