Box Office Results: August 9-11

In a weekend where four new pictures entered the marketplace, I did manage to get the order of the top five called correctly. However, one film in particular managed to easily surpass my expectations, while the others debuted more or less in line with my predictions.

Neill Blomkamp’s sci-fi actioner Elysium with Matt Damon took the #1 position with $30.5 million, a bit below my $33.7M estimate. Elysium is the highly publicized Blomkamp follow-up to his 2009 breakthrough District 9. Reviews were decent though not as strong as the aforementioned predecessor, which was nominated for Best Picture and took in $115 million domestically. Elysium received a B Cinemascore grade, which generally indicates audiences weren’t wild about what they saw. The pic will likely suffer a hefty drop next weekend and it appears unlikely it will match District‘s haul stateside.

It was the #2 debut that took me by surprise. We’re the Millers, the raunchy comedy with Jennifer Aniston and Jason Sudeikis, had a rock solid start with $26.6 million over Friday-to-Sunday and $38 million since its Wednesday opening. That is well above my predictions of $19.4M over the traditional weekend and $27.2M over the five day. Clearly, Millers marketing campaign worked and crowds were ready to see a new comedy.

Disney’s Planes opened in third with a decent though unspectacular $22.5 million, which did exceed my $19.4M prediction. The weekend’s other kid flick had a fair debut as the sequel Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters grossed $14.6 million over Friday-to-Sunday and $23.5 million since its Wednesday start. Its traditional weekend take was slightly lower than my $15.8M estimate while its five day gross was slightly higher than my $21.9M prediction.

In the five spot, last weekend’s champ 2 Guns with Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg dropped further than I figured in its second weekend with $11.1 million (I said $14.3M).

And there’s your results! And now begins the work of predicting next weekend’s four new flicks: Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Kick-Ass 2, Paranoia, and Jobs. I’ll have those up on the blog soon enough.