Box Office: Mutant Turtles And Superheroes Lead A Weak Week

Out with the old mutants, in with the new.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows topped the box office this weekend with an estimated $35.3 million between Thursday and Saturday nights — barely half of the $65.6 million that the last Turtles opened to in 2014.

Meanwhile, last week’s box-office champ — X-Men: Apocalypse, which is based on a very different sort of comic book about mutants — earned $22.3 million, which represents a drop of 66.1% since the film’s already-soft opening last week.

With the notable exception of Captain America: Civil War — and possibly Deadpool, which doesn’t really count — sequels have not been doing very well this year.

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, The Huntsman: Winter’s War, God’s Not Dead 2, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 and The Divergent Series: Allegiant have all grossed only a fraction of what their predecessors made, while Kung Fu Panda 3, Ride Along 2, London Has Fallen, Barbershop: The Next Cut and Zoolander 2 have also made less money than the films that preceded them within their respective franchises.

And then there is Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which admittedly did do a bit better than Man of Steel — the film it is a direct sequel to — but it was also the first Batman movie in a decade that failed to gross a billion dollars worldwide.

So the newest Turtles and X-Men films may be part of that general downward trend.

Turtles has earned another $34 million overseas for a global total of $69.3 million.

And Apocalypse has grossed $116.5 million to date in North America and $286 million overseas, for a global total of $402.5 million. Overseas, the film has outgrossed every other X-Men movie except for Deadpool and Days of Future Past.

Third place this week went to the right-to-die romance Me Before You, which earned $18.3 million in its first weekend. The film stars Emilia Clarke as a woman who befriends a wealthy, disabled man (Sam Claflin) who plans to end his life.

The weekend’s other big new film was the pop-music parody Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which earned $4.6 million and landed in eighth place.

That’s slightly less than the $5.3 million that Hot Rod — the first film produced by Andy Samberg’s The Lonely Island comedy troupe — opened to in 2007.

Meanwhile, in other box-office news…

Zootopia finally fell out of the weekly top ten in North America, but it also became the second movie of the year to gross a billion dollars worldwide.

The film grossed $790,000 in its fourteenth week, thereby raising its domestic cume to $337.2 million. The film has earned another $662.8 million overseas.

Alice through the Looking Glass earned $10.7 million and ranked fourth in its second week, thereby raising its domestic cume to $50.8 million. The film has earned another $125.5 million overseas for a global total of $176.3 million.

The Angry Birds Movie earned $9.8 million and ranked fifth in its third week, thereby raising its domestic cume to $86.7 million. The film has earned another $196.8 million overseas for a global total of $283.5 million.

Captain America: Civil War earned $7.6 million and ranked sixth in its fifth week, thereby raising its domestic cume to $388.9 million. The film has earned another $742.6 million overseas for a global total of $1,131.5 million — which currently makes it the 12th-highest-grossing film of all time worldwide.

The Jungle Book grossed $4.2 million and ranked ninth in its eighth week, thereby raising its domestic cume to $347.5 million. The film has earned another $547.6 million overseas for a global total of $895.1 million.

Love & Friendship grossed $2.2 million and ranked 11th in its fourth week, thereby raising its domestic cume to $7 million. The film has earned another $493,283 overseas for a global total of $7.5 million.

Now for a bit of extra data on Zootopia’s ranking among animated films:

In North America, the film now ranks eighth: