The weekend box office figures are in and Suicide Squad remained No. 1 for a third straight week in the US, while the new Ben-Hur came in low.
Suicide Squad pulled in $20.7 million for the weekend, according to Deadline, which has a full report of the weekend’s box office figures. It becomes the fifth movie this year to stay at No. 1 for three straight weekends, following Deadpool, Zootopia, The Jungle Book, and Finding Dory.
Finishing No. 2 this weekend was Sausage Party ($15.1 million), which was in its second weekend. The R-rated War Dogs, starring Jonah Hill and Miles Teller, pulled in $14.3 million to come in at No. 3.
Rounding out the top five for the US box office were Kubo and the Two Strings ($12.6 million) and Ben-Hur ($11.35 million). As Deadline notes, Ben-Hur‘s start is not very encouraging, given the movie had a $100 million production budget. It made another $10.7 million internationally, but it’s still apparently considered a poor result.
According to one marketer speaking to Deadline, Paramount and MGM could have done a better job marketing Ben-Hur to the faithful. “Faith is not a niche,” said Matthew Faraci, the president of faith crowd marketing agency Inspire Buzz. “Therefore, in a situation where the content is well-crafted and faithful but there is lower-than-expected box office performance, you have to take a serious look at the marketing strategy and analyze how it fell short in driving turnout and convincing folks to show up.”
Suicide Squad has now made more than half a billion dollars at the box office, globally. Go to Deadline to see a full recap of this weekend’s box office performance.
A Ben-Hur movie tie-in game was also released and well…you might not want to play it.