‘Gravity’ achieves box office three-peat, Wikileaks drama ‘The Fifth Estate’ bombs

There were several storylines at the box office this weekend. Gravity pulled off a rare three-peat, Captain Phillips had a surprisingly strong second weekend and the Wikileaks drama did exactly what Julian Assange hoped for - it flopped. The Fifth Estate earned one of the worst openings of 2013. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone’s Escape Plan also bombed.

Gravity earned $44 million last weekend after opening to $55 million the weekend before. This past weekend, it added $31 million, dropping just 28 percent, reports Box Office Mojo. After just 17 days in theaters, it’s made $170.6 million so far, making it the tenth-highest grossing film of the year already.

The Tom Hanks-starring Captain Phillips needed just $17.3 million to hold on to the No. 2 spot, a 31 percent drop from its first weekend. It’s made $53.3 million after 10 days.

The best new release of the weekend was the remake of Carrie, which scored $17 million, far less than Sony’s last horror remake, Evil Dead, which opened to $25.8 million. As TheWrap notes, the film was made for under $30 million and did earn a B- CinemaScore grade, so that’s helpful for Sony. It will also be the only horror film in theaters this Halloween.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 added $10.1 million, while Escape Plan opened to just $9.8 million. But that was much better than The Fifth Estate.

The film, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Assange, has had to overcome WikiLeaks’ campaign to torpedo the film and unfortunately for Dreamworks and Disney, it worked. Either that, or people just didn’t care at all about WikiLeaks. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film made just $1.7 million, despite opening at over 1,700 locations. It’s the worst opening for a 2013 release with over 1,500 locations. Assange also released his own film over the weekend, a documentary titled Mediastan.

Fox Searchlight’s 12 Years A Slave, the acclaimed film from Steve McQueen, grossed $960,000 at 19 locations this weekend. The distributor is looking to bring it to another 100 locations this weekend and there will be another big push on Nov. 1.

image: Warner Bros.

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