Sorry, Melissa McCarthy. Moviegoers just weren’t into Tammy. They didn’t want to be delivered from Evil, either. Apparently, audiences still just wanted to play with their Transformers.
Sure, Transformers: Age of Extinction may have lost nearly two-thirds of its audience from the previous weekend. But it still held onto enough paying customers to collect an estimated $36.4 million and coast to its second straight box office win. It has already collected $174.7 million in North America (and a hefty $400 million elsewhere), making director Michael Bay’s latest boomfest one of 2014’s unmitigated success stories.
Well, maybe slightly mitigated. Despite its repeat at the top of the box office, Age of Extinction still trails the last two installments of the series “by a wide margin,” according to Box Office Mojo. The cinematic number crunchers over there figure Age of Extinction will wrap its domestic run with, at most, $265 million—not bad, but well short of all three previous Transformers movies (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen leads the shape-shifting Autobot track with $402.1 mil).
Age of Extinction is emblematic of a rather sleepy cinematic summer. Box Office Mojo says that the summer of 2014 will likely be one of the slowest in the last 10 years, and this marks a really slow start to the “ever-important month of July.”
Of course, maybe the stereotypical summer season just doesn’t mean as much as it used to. For years, we moviegoers have been conditioned to expect the biggest blockbusters to be released between May and August. But this year’s summer had an exceptionally early start, with Captain America: The Winter Soldier launching April 4. One of the year’s biggest hits, The LEGO Movie, was released in the typical moviegoing doldrums of February. And, really, outside next weekend’s maybe-maybe-not hit Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (and arguably Aug. 1’s Guardians of the Galaxy), there’s not a guaranteed summer smash left on the docket.
The only other film to crest the $20 million mark this week was McCarthy’s R-rated comedy Tammy, which cleared $21.2 million. The other two big new releases—Deliver Us From Evil and Earth to Echo—didn’t even do that well. Deliver Us, the faith-tinged exorcism horror-fest, banked a mere $9.5 million to crawl into third place. The kid-centric throwback piece Earth to Echo trailed Deliver Us by just a little over a million bucks (it earned $8.3 million), slipping below the Top 5, trailing both 22 Jump Street ($9.4 million) and How to Train Your Dragon 2 ($8.8 million).
Final figures update: 1. Transformers: Age of Extinction, $37.1 million; 2. Tammy, $21.6 million; 3. 22 Jump Street, $9.8 million. Deliver Us From Evil slipped to fourth place with $9.7 million. How to Train Your Dragon 2 finished fifth with $9 million, and Earth to Echo was sixth with $8.4 million.
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