Greta Gerwig’s Barbie has finally lost its place after standing strong atop the UK-Ireland box office chart for six weekends, with Antoine Fuqua’s Denzel Washington starrer The Equalizer 3 racing to the number one spot in its opening weekend, taking just shy of £2m.
This came amid a busy weekend at the box office, as the UK enjoyed National Cinema Day, in which tickets were discounted to at least £3 across 630 cinemas. It generated £4.65m at the box office from nearly 1.56 million admissions on Saturday (a 6% increase on last year). Family holdover titles such as Disney’s animation Elemental, Paramount’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and Universal’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie enjoyed particular uplift this weekend.
Sony’s The Equalizer 3 is based on a 1980s TV series of the same name, and stars Dakota Fanning alongside Washington as a US government assassin who has tried to leave his job behind him and relocate to southern Italy for a quiet life, with little success.
It played at 583 locations, for a site average of £3,368. With previews, the total takings soar to £2.8m. The first film in the franchise opened to £1.9m in September 2014, while the sequel opened similarly, to just below £2m in August 2018.
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie took £1.6m in its seventh weekend for Warner Bros, a 16% drop on its previous session, taking its total up to £92.6m. It is now comfortably ranked above 2019’s Avengers: Endgame (£88.7m) to be the seventh highest-grossing film of all time in the territory, but has not quite hit the £94m mark of 2009’s Avatar to claim sixth place.
Universal’s Christopher Nolan epic Oppenheimer, also on its seventh weekend, has widened its gap with Barbie, bringing in £960,300, a 41% drop on its previous session. Its total is now £55.4m.
Paramount grossed £619,000 for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem in its fifth weekend – a 29% boost on its previous session, for a total now of £9.2m. The title took £419,000 on Saturday alone, a 131% increase on the previous Saturday’s takings – a nice result from National Cinema Day.
It was a strong start for Sound Of Freedom, taking £589,456 for Angel Studios from 528 locations in its opening weekend, averaging £1,116. This figure rises to £759,684 with previews.
Sound Of Freedom is a biographical story and religious thriller, directed by Alejandro Monteverde and starring The Passion Of The Christ’s Jim Caviezel, about a government agent-turned-vigilante who aims to rescue children from sex traffickers. It has utilised a Pay It Forward mechanism, that allows people who have seen it and/or are passionate about the issue to purchase a ticket for anyone who may not be able to afford one themselves.
The film has brought in $195.5m in global box office takings from 28 territories, and attracted some controversy along the way, owing to it being championed by conspiracists from the far-right QAnon movement – a link that Monteverde denies.
