This was Hollywood's worst Labor Day weekend in nearly two decades
If you skimmed the showtimes for your local multiplex this weekend and decided there wasn't anything worth leaving your house for, you're not alone.
The U.S. box office is currently on track for the lowest-grossing Labor Day weekend in nearly two decades, capping off the lowest-grossing summer movie season in over a decade. Ouch.
To be sure, Labor Day is pretty much always a slow time for movie theaters – you'll almost never see a major studio waste a potential hit on a Labor Day weekend opening. This year, however, was unusual in that there were no new wide releases at all.
The top ten spots for this weekend are all currently held by holdovers from previous weeks. The first "new movie" doesn't appear on Box Office Mojo's chart until #13, and it's not actually a "new movie" at all – it's a re-release of the 40-year-old classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which has brought in an estimated $1.8 million from about 900 theaters.
The second biggest "new" movie isn't new either; it's the IMAX-only run of the first two episodes of ABC's Inhumans, which has brought in roughly $1.5 million so far. That's enough to just bare squeeze Marvel's limited engagement into this weekend's top 20 performers. (The Dark Tower, Baby Driver, and The Glass Castle are all hovering around the same total gross for the weekend.)
Coming in third among this weekend's debuts is Alicia Vikander's Tulip Fever, which – yay – actually is a new movie! Well, kind of. It's a film best known, if it's known at all, for getting pushed back again and again over the course of about two years. But not even the lack of competition could turn Tulip Fever into a hit, and it's only scraped together about $1.2 million so far.
Still, it's not all bad news. With so little else going on, The Hitman's Bodyguard managed to hold on to its #1 slot for the third weekend in a row – the first film since April's The Fate of the Furious to manage that feat. And Annabelle: Creation continues to perform solidly, grabbing the #2 slot with $7.3 million.
In fact, most of the returning titles this weekend have done pretty well. Six of the top ten films did as well or better than they did last week. If we look at per-theater averages, the numbers look even better, with nine of the ten showing an improvement.
That includes Wonder Woman, whose $409-ish million was enough to push it juuuust past Iron Man 3, making it the fifth-biggest superhero movie of all time. Trust Diana to shine like the sun in the middle of a dismal wasteland.
All box office data provided by Box Office Mojo unless indicated otherwise.
