“American Ultra” Flops at Friday Box Office; “Compton” Also Tops “Sinister 2”

In its fourth week of release, Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is expected to make $12 million an arrive in second place.

“Sinister 2“, the horror sequel, collected $10.6 million on its debut this weekend, missing a BoxOffice.com forecast of $14.5 million.

The sleeper hit from Comcast Corp.’s Universal Pictures collected $26.8 million in the U.S. and Canada, researcher Rentrak Corp. said Sunday in an e-mailed statement.

The careers of Snoop, Tupac, Warren G, Daz (who is Snoop’s cousin), Kurupt and a host of others West Coast rappers largely took off in the wake of N.W.A., which put gangsta rap on the mainstream map. The film had a niche appeal despite its two fairly big-name stars in Jessie Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart and audiences were not too enthusiastic about it with a B- CinemaScore. The Focus/Gramercy pic, made on a $10 million budget, will play across 2,766 theaters. “Hitman: Agent 47” cost US$35 to bring to the screen. “Any artist out there that wanna be a artist and wanna stay a star and don’t want to worry about the executive producer wanting to be all in the videos, all on the record, dancing, come to Death Row”. That is considerably lower than the original film, which earned $18 million in its first weekend, and the sequel’s mediocre reviews do not bode well for its legs. Broad Green’s romance “Learning to Drive” starring Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley parks in four cinemas including the ArcLight Hollywood and Landmark in Los Angeles. None of the three opening films cost their distributors much, so while the there’s little excitement generated by the soft debuts, there’s not much financial pain, either. It will expand to four additional markets next weekend. On track for a weekend in the high-$20 millions, “Compton” will easily cross the $100 million cumulative mark by weekend’s end.

Despite the Comcast CMCSA, -2.72% unit’s success with “Compton”, the weekend’s box-office revenue was down about 6% from the same weekend a year ago, when sales were led “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles“.