‘Deadpool’ tops charts again as ‘Reagan’ beats expectations

AP:

Just like in the movies, Deadpool can’t be killed.

Deadpool & Wolverine, one of the defining movies of the summer, ruled the box office on a weekend with quiet openings and low theatre attendance as the summer movie season came to an anticlimactic close.

For the second weekend in a row, Deadpool & Wolverine, Marvel’s smash hit that has shattered records and become the best-selling R-rated movie of all time, topped the charts, with other holdovers from the summer following behind. After six weeks in theatres, the film made $15.2 million domestically Friday through to Sunday, and it’s expected to cross the domestic $600-million mark following Monday’s Labour Day holiday. The Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman superhero flick will be one of only 16 titles to hit that milestone.

Reagan, a biopic starring Dennis Quaid as the 40th US president, was the only new release competitive with holdover films that opened earlier this summer. Exceeding projections, the first full-length film about President Ronald Reagan earned $7.4 million over the three-day weekend, with an estimated cumulative total of $9.2 million, including projections for Monday.

Audiences have reacted to the movie positively, giving it an A CinemaScore and a 98 per cent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics have been less receptive, giving it a 19 per cent rating and deeming it ‘rotten’ on the popular ratings site. It ranked No. 4 on the charts.

The summer movie season, which runs from Memorial Day through to Labour Day, proved to be full of surprises, flops and overperformers. Deadpool, Despicable Me 4, Inside Out 2, and Twisters brought in impressive earnings and remained on the charts for several weeks after their releases, with all four titles claiming spots in the top 10 Labour Day weekend.

“If you were to write up a blueprint of perhaps the most unpredictable summer ever, 2024 might be just that,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. “May gave us a challenge, but June, July and the beginning of August really delivered.”

The cumulative summer box office clocked in at over $3.6 billion domestically – a dip of 10 per cent from 2023’s $4-billion season that could likely be attributed to the Barbenheimer box office craze that drew crowds en masse to see Barbie and Oppenheimer last summer.

The close of the season brought what Dergarabedian described as a “stranglehold” of familiar summer hits on box office rankings, with Alien: Romulus and It Ends With Us rounding out the top three for the second weekend in a row. Six of the top 10 films of the weekend had been playing for three or more weeks.