As summer winds down and trips to the theater are replaced by trips to the store to buy back-to-school supplies, Hollywood’s studios are unloading the sweltering season’s final rounds of big-budget CGI ammo.
Wielding exactly such a cinematic weapon over the weekend was Matt Damon, whose cyborg-like role in the sci-fi thriller Elysium gunned down $29.8 million. But in a summer full of big-budget flops, Elysium looks likely to line up with the likes of fellow Sony underachievers After Earth, White House Down and The Smurfs 2 (not to mention fellow high-dollar accounting headaches from other studios such as The Lone Ranger, Pacific Rim and R.I.P.D.). The $115 million film debuted at No. 1, but analysts are already saying it’s unlikely to break the $100 million mark domestically.
Clocking in at No. 2 was Jennifer Aniston’s R-rated We’re the Millers (in which she plays a stripper posing as a mother), with a $26.4 million take. Cars spinoff Planes—originally slated to be a direct-to-video Disney release (not Pixar, as one might assume given the obvious Cars connection)—landed at No. 3 with $22.2 million. And while that number may not seem impressively stratospheric, it was still good enough to make the cartoon the highest-earning animated debut ever in August.
Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, the follow-up to 2010’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians: Lightning Thief, was the week’s final wide-release newcomer. It limped in at a distant No. 4 with a less-than-mythological debut of $14.4 million. That number was less than half of its predecessor’s $31.2 million bow—one that virtually guarantees Percy’s latest adventure will also join the still-growing list of 2013’s special effects-driven laggards.
Rounding out the Top 5 was the only holdover from last week, Denzel Washington and Mark Walhberg’s adrenaline-filled thriller 2 Guns, which popped off another $11.2 million its second weekend in theaters.
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