‘Alien: Romulus’ bites off $41.5 million to top box office charts

AP:

Alien: Romulus, the latest instalment in the 45-year-old franchise, opened in first place at the North American box office. The 20th Century Studios release earned an estimated $41.5 million in its first weekend, where it was playing in 3,885 locations in the US and Canada.

Including $66.7 million from international showings in 49 markets, Alien: Romulus boasted a $108.2 million global début. The Walt Disney Co., which owns 20th Century Studios, claimed the top two spots on the charts, with Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine now in its fourth weekend, taking second place with $29 million.

August can often be slow for the movie business, or, less charitably, a dumping ground. But while 2024 has lagged overall for the movie business, a string of recent hits helped build a momentum that put this late August weekend over 30 per cent ahead of the same weekend last year. It’s also up over 10 per cent from August 2019.

Alien: Romulus director, Fede Álvarez, recruited a cast of up-and-coming 20-somethings to lead the cast including Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson and Isabela Merced. The sci-fi film leans into Álvarez’s propensity for all things horror and embraces the franchise’s horror roots.

The romantic drama, It Ends With Us, landed in third place with $24 million. The Sony movie starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, who also directed, has made $97.8 million to date. It cost only $25 million to produce. The film was adapted from the bestselling Colleen Hoover novel of the same name that follows Lively as Lily Bloom, a woman at a crossroads when a past love upends her current relationship with Baldoni’s Ryle Kincaid.

Twisters placed fourth in its fifth weekend with $9.8 million from 3,483 theatres and rounding out the top five was a re-release, Coraline, which made $11.3 million in four days and $8.9 million from Friday through Sunday. The stop-motion animated film was an adaptation of a Neil Gaiman novella, written and directed by Henry Selick.

Borderlands, the video game adaptation starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart and Jamie Lee Curtis, brought in $2.4 million in its second weekend bringing its total box office earnings to a modest $13.5 million compared to its reported $120 million budget.