Weekend Box Office: Deadpool & Wolverine hangs on to the top spot; Borderland a disaster

It was husband vs wife this weekend at the top of the box office charts, with Blake Lively’s romantic drama, It Ends With Us, battling it out for the top spot with hubby Ryan Reynolds’s box office behemoth, Deadpool & Wolverine. In the end, the superhero team-up movie managed to hold on to the top spot for a third weekend in a row, grossing an outstanding $54 million, which is only a 44% drop since last week (that’s a great hold), with the film likely to cross the $500 million mark at the domestic box office by mid-week.

However, while it wasn’t able to eke out a win over Deadpool, It Ends With Us, which is adapted from the novel by Colleen Hoover, was still a major win. The Blake Lively vehicle’s $50 million gross makes it one of the highest-grossing romantic dramas in recent memory, with it well on its way to becoming a major counter-programming summer hit in the vein of The Notebook. The film doubled its production cost this weekend alone, and the A-minus CinemaScore rating suggests it’ll have legs at the box office.

However, the weekend’s other new release was a disaster. While no one expected Eli Roth’s Borderlands to set the world on fire, the final $8 million box office take was much worse than we predicted in last week’s box office estimates. With a deadly D+ CinemaScore rating, Borderlands now seems primed to go down as one of the biggest box office disasters of all time. While I doubt the movie’s failure will have too much of an impact on Cate Blanchett or Kevin Hart’s careers, I fully expect Eli Roth to stick to the horror genre from now on, with him already hard at work on Thanksgiving 2.

Borderlands‘ failure was Twisters‘ gain, with the well-received movie holding up nicely at the box office, with a strong $15 million haul and a domestic total in the $222 million range. However, M. Night Shyamalan’s poorly reviewed Trap (despite a powerhouse Josh Hartnett performance) had a hard time in its second weekend, slipping behind Illumination’s Despicable Me 4 to land in sixth place with a $6.7 million haul. While the 56% drop isn’t a disaster, the general consensus seems this isn’t one of Shyamalan’s better movies (although it’s far from his worst). 

Pixar’s Inside Out 2 also managed to hold on to its family audience, with the nearly $5 million gross putting it over $636 million domestically. Rival family movie Harold and the Purple Crayon had a disastrous weekend, losing half its audience for a $3.1 million weekend and only a $936 per-screen average (per ComScore’s numbers). 

Two horror flicks from Neon rounded out the chart. Their latest movie, Cuckoo, starring Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer, earned a softer-than-expected $3 million, with a C+ CinemaScore that doesn’t inspire much confidence (but our critic Tyler Nichols loved it). At the same time, breakout hit Longlegs rounded out the top 10 with $2 million. It’s now earned over $71 million domestically and should end its run well north of $75 million, making it one of the most profitable indie horror movies of all time.

Next weekend, Alien: Romulus will be released, which relaunches one of the best sci-fi/ horror franchises ever. Do you think it will grow north of $50 million? Let us know in the comments!