THE WEEKEND ACTUALS

	Film	Weekend	Opening Weekend	Current Gross
	Ant-Man	$24,909,332 million	$57,225,526 million	$106,219,861 million
	Pixels	$24,011,616 million	$24,011,616 million	$24,011,616 million
	Minions	$22,933,960 million	$115,718,405 million	$262,454,370 million
	Trainwreck	$17,281,950 million	$30,097,040 million	$61,526,975 million
	Southpaw	$16,701,294 million	$16,701,294 million	16,701,294$ million

Even after dropping 56% in its 2nd week, Ant-Man reigned, shutting out Pixels by only $0.9 million. As predicted, this weekend had a lot of close calls, with the front-runners all within $8 million of each other. Pixels was hampered by extremely negative reviews and, to be frank, a general lack of interest across the board. The Adam Sandler movie can thank males under 25 for any ticket sales it enjoyed. While Marvel’s Ant-Man passed $106 million domestically, Sony’s faced with another slump, one in a long string this year.

Sony’s highest grosser thus far has been March’s Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 with $70.7 million domestically. Until Spectre appears in November, Sony’s slate isn’t looking good. They’ve got a couple small dramas on the books, some that look great (The Walk), some not so much (Ricki and the Flash), as well as some family friendly fare (Hotel Transylvania 2 and Goosebumps). The latter two could surprise in the Halloween season, but likely not by enough to make up for the trip-ups the studio’s seen lately. The last Sony flick to hit $100 million domestically was Denzel Washington’s The Equalizer almost a year ago.

With another $22.9 million, Minions keeps winning for Universal, adding up to $262 million domestically, and $760 million worldwide. Meanwhile Universal’s other current breadwinner Jurassic World, which sits pretty in 8th place this week with $7.2 million, has passed $1.5 billion worldwide. Trainwreck posted a drop of only 43% at $17 million its second weekend out, meaning its grossed a sizable $61.5 million thus far. For anyone keeping track at home, that means it’s set to best Terminator: Genisys, which is at only $85.6 million in 4 weeks.

Southpaw surprised, punching Paper Towns out of the top 5 with $16.7 million to the Towns‘ $12.6 million. Paper Towns did just fine considering its $12 million budget, but underperformed given last years John Green adaptation The Fault in Our Stars‘ breakout $48 million. Inside Out followed at 7th place with another $7.4 million, bringing its domestic total to $320 million, about $300 million short of Jurassic World‘s $624 million, but still not too shabby.

Vacation, the followup to the 1983 classic National Lampoon’s Vacation, opens wide on Wednesday. The 30-years-later sequel stars Ed Helms and Christina Applegate as a new generation of Griswold parents trying to take their family to the infamous Walley World. Early projections are putting the road trip flick at $27 million. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, the 5th in the M:I series, hopes to drastically outperform its predecessors with a $70+ million opening. With widespread marketing and not a lot of competition, it’s certainly on track to beat 2011’s Ghost Protocol wide opening of $29.6 million twice over.

(Sources: boxoffice.com, rottentomatoes.com, imdb.com, metacritic.com. Starred figures are estimates. Tweets represent figures for this week only. Figures represent numbers at time of writing, and may have changed. Tracking Board does not report Rotten Tomatoes user ratings for movies that have not yet seen wide release.)

Parker Mills | Contributor