The winner
Three years ago, Rise of the Planet of the Apes had the misfortune to face the arrival of The Inbetweeners Movie on its second week of release. While hardly occupying the same space in terms of mood and genre, the TV spinoff sucked up a huge cinema audience, and Rise fell 49% at the box-office that weekend.
This time, with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, it's a different story. Ever since Warners moved the Wachowskis' Jupiter Ascending off the 25 July date, the slot in the release calendar has looked exceptionally soft, especially for a weekend that essentially kicks off the English school summer holiday. Fox presumably couldn't have been happier that the strongest competition Dawn would face on its second weekend came from Brett Ratner's Hercules, hardly one of the most enticing prospects of summer.
The result? Dawn fell 47% on its second weekend, an almost identical drop to Rise's. For a summer blockbuster, plunging by half is pretty much par for the course – Transformers: Age of Extinction declined 52% in its second session – but the weak competitive environment seemed to promise a more gentle fall on this occasion.
Now that the school holiday has begun, cinemagoing becomes less concentrated into the weekend, more spread across the week, and Fox can point to a healthy result overall. The last seven days saw Dawn gross a nifty £8.26m, bringing its total to £16.97m after just 11 days. That's the third-highest total this year for a film after two weekends of play, behind The Lego Movie (£21.88m at this stage of its run) and X-Men: Days of Future Past (£19.47m). Dawn will easily cruise past Rise's lifetime total of £20.77m.
• Mark Kermode reviews Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: The ape of things to come
The runner-up
Since Hercules was always highly unlikely to knock the Apes off the top spot, Paramount will be happy to have landed in second place with its swords-and-sandals action adventure. But the opening number, £1.45m, is hardly cause for great cheer. That's only the 27th biggest debut of 2014 so far, even if previews are excluded from all films' opening tallies. It's lower than the first sessions of titles including The Monuments Men, Need for Speed and Last Vegas: hardly films that captured the popular imagination.
Within the Dwayne Johnson oeuvre, comparisons are hard to make, since so many of his bigger hits are franchise pictures originating with other actors: Fast Five, Fast & Furious 6, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, GI Joe: Retaliation and Mummy spinoff The Scorpion King. Last August, Pain & Gain, co-starring Mark Wahlberg, began with £1.02m including previews of £367,000. Two months before, Snitch kicked off with £268,000. Hercules at least opened significantly (more than seven times) bigger then Kellan Lutz starrer The Legend of Hercules. That film kicked off in March with £190,000 from 276 cinemas.
• Little Hercules: Stuart Heritage eats and exercises like The Rock for a day
• Peter Bradshaw reviews Hercules
The genre hit
With a production budget of just $9m (£5.3m), as against a reported $100m (£59m) for Hercules, The Purge: Anarchy looks a much more profitable proposition, if UK box office is anything to go by. The latest from low-budget genre hitmaker producer Jason Blum (Paranormal Activity, Insidious) lands with a nifty £1.17m from 385 cinemas, yielding a £3,026 average. That's slightly ahead of the debut of the original The Purge in May 2013: £1.02m from 348 venues. In that session, The Purge faced five other films all grossing £1m-plus, collectively representing rather tougher competition faced on this occasion by sequel Anarchy.
• Mark Kermode reviews The Purge: Anarchy
• The Purge: Anarchy - Six of the worst masked men in horror
The first six months
Admissions numbers – which take significantly longer to arrive than box-office data collected by Rentrak – are now in for June, and thus for the first six months of the year. Given the Fifa World Cup kicked off on 12 June, with the inevitable knock-on effect on the film release calendar, it's no great surprise to see UK admissions (number of tickets sold) for June 2014 trailing behind 2013 levels (10.40m vs 13.03m). More worrying for the film industry is the overall picture: admissions down 8% on 2013 for the first six months of the year. Cinema owners will be hoping that Guardians of the Galaxy and The Inbetweeners 2 can end the summer on a high note, with the year's fourth quarter offering Chris Nolan's Interstellar, David Fincher's Gone Girl, the next Hunger Games and the final Hobbit, among other likely winners.
The arthouse market
Once again, Richard Linklater's Boyhood is the top arthouse title, in fact rising one place to No 7 in the chart. The film has made another significant expansion of footprint, now playing at a wide 253 cinemas, with the site average tumbling by 44%. That drop is likely a reflection of the film now playing at less-targeted sites, and it will be holding up better at core arthouse venues. (The film fell a slimmer 30% at London's Curzon Soho, for example.) After 17 days of play, Boyhood has grossed £1.43m, which compares with £932,000 lifetime for the best-performing entry in the director's Before trilogy (2004's Sunset). School of Rock, with £10.50m, is the only previous Linklater film to have exceeded £1m in the UK.
Boyhood opened the same weekend as John Carney's Begin Again, and the two films have gone on opposite trajectories. Boyhood began with 89 cinemas, expanding to 159 and then 253 venues, while Begin Again has followed a more conventional pattern of steady contraction following an initial release at 347 theatres. While Begin Again originally scored better than Boyhood (£456,000 vs £333,000), it's now seven places lower in the chart, with a gross this past weekend of £83,000. Its total to date is a decent £1.32m.
Top new entry among arthouse titles is David Gordon Green's Joe, with £34,000 from 37 cinemas. The film was released simultaneously on video-on-demand, although earnings from this platform have not been disclosed.
• Richard Linklater and Ellar Coltrane: 'Making Boyhood was a dear process'
• Oscar predictions 2014: Joe
The tail end
With 15 new films released at the weekend – pretty much par for the course these days – once again a number of titles have eluded the attention of audiences. The bottom five in the "Other openers" chart (see below) managed less than £2,000 between them. And spare a thought for Scar Tissue, which recorded an official gross of just £10. The 18-certificate thriller (tagline: "Evil leaves its mark", although evidently not at the UK box office) played lunchtimes only at London's Rich Mix cinema in Bethnal Green. The film has now switched to London's Peckham Multiplex, and is on DVD and on demand from 4 August.
The future
Given the relatively weak field of new releases, grosses predictably trailed the equivalent weekend from 2013 (by 25%), when The Wolverine landed at the top spot. Cinema bookers now hope takings will bounce back with the arrival on Thursday of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, which is picking up warm buzz. Also in the mix: dance sequel Step Up 5: All In, animation The Nut Job and a range of smaller pictures including period romance A Promise and Michel Gondry's whimsical Mood Indigo. The following week (6 August) sees The Inbetweeners 2, and the exhibition industry will be ardently hoping that audience enthusiasm hasn't dimmed any since the original The Inbetweeners Movie scored an amazing £45m in 2011.
Top 10 films 25-27 July
1. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, £3,752,511 from 574 sites. Total: £16,969,650
2. Hercules, £1,449,120 from 441 sites (New)
3. The Purge: Anarchy, £1,165,143 from 385 sites (New)
4. How to Train Your Dragon 2, £990,959 from 588 sites. Total: £15,111,906
5. Transformers: Age of Extinction, £803,063 from 480 sites. Total: £17,375,039
6. Earth to Echo, £618,379 from 456 sites (New)
7. Boyhood, £279,701 from 253 sites. Total: £1,426,480
8. Kick, £239,850 from 129 sites (New)
9. Mrs Brown's Boys D'Movie, £228,764 from 299 sites. Total: £13,890,655
10. The House of Magic, £223,047 from 308 sites (New)
Other openers
Joe, £33,660 from 37 sites
The Lady from Shanghai, £6,912 from six sites (re-release)
Who Is Dayani Cristal?, £3,850 from three sites
Believe, £2,463 from 13 sites
The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, £1,106 from one site
Northwest, £650 from three sites
Smart Ass, £572 from one site
Branded to Kill, £486 from two sites (rerelease)
Mindscape, £109 from one site
Scar Tissue, £10 from one site
Thanks to Rentrak
