Weekend Box-Office: August 17-19, 2012

Sly and the gang hit #1 with #2!

Sylvester Stallone and his macho men of mayhem returned to theaters with copious explosions and gratuitous carnage, putting THE EXPENDABLES 2 in the top spot with $28.7 million.

Despite some additional action-star firepower, a bigger budget and even more spent ammunition, the Simon West-directed sequel missed the first movie’s bullseye of $34.8M (despite expectations it would perform the same or better). The original THE EXPENDABLES went on to $103M domestically two years ago, plus another $171.4M from international crowds, and THE EXPENDABLES 2 has decent word-of-mouth and could have even stronger overseas appeal.

Last weekend’s champ THE BOURNE LEGACY dropped a little more than half its business to grasp second place with another $17 million (but even without series star Matt Damon, LEGACY is the most expensive movie to bear the Bourne name with a $125M budget). The #2 from last week, the Will Ferrell/Zack Galifianakis political showdown THE CAMPAIGN, also slipped by around 50% to land in fourth with $13.3 million.

The rest of the weekend’s new features were sprinkled among the chart, with PARANORMAN performing strongest in #3 with a $14 million opening. The stop-motion animated supernatural family film came from the company behind 2009’s CORALINE, which started out with $16.8M and went on to $75.2M domestically. The musical drama SPARKLE, featuring the late Whitney Houston, premiered in fifth with $12M (its budget was only $14M), and Disney’s homegrown-boy fantasy THE ODD LIFE OF TIMOTHY GREEN (which opened Wednesday) took the seventh spot with $10.9M for the weekend.

After five weeks in theaters, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES had to settle for sixth place but has crossed the $400 million mark (and surpassed THE HUNGER GAMES’ $407.6M), and it now sits just outside the Top 10 all-time domestic money-makers — it just has to beat TOY STORY 3’s $415M and THE LION KING’s $422.7M. But don’t expect it to crack into the top all-time worldwide grosses — it’s currently at #28, even with its $855M global total.

The elder romcom HOPE SPRINGS is still doing decent counterprogramming business, while the TOTAL RECALL update is about to become a distant memory. Outside the Top 10, limited releases of the thriller COMPLIANCE, ROBOT & FRANK and David Cronenberg’s COSMOPOLIS had the weekend’s highest per-screen averages.

This was the first weekend in some time where more than four movies made over $10M (that hasn’t happened since early July). But even without the Olympics competing for attention, there still seems to be some hesitation about heading to theaters post-Colorado massacre — and not without reason, as this week had bomb threats at Carmike Cinemas, and some guy accidentally shot himself in the ass at a Nevada theater. With solid-looking releases on the schedule but no real must-see “event” material (maybe TAKEN 2?) until Bond returns in November with SKYFALL, that lack of theater-going enthusiasm might not change for a while…

Next week puts Joseph Gordon-Levitt on a bicycle in the courier thriller PREMIUM RUSH, Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell hit the road in the action-comedy HIT & RUN (on Wednesday), and spooks appear in the horror flick THE APPARITION.

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